Embodied Control Theory and Engineering for Autonomous Unmanned Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Autonomous unmanned systems are pivotal in advancing aerospace, smart infrastructure, and critical rescue operations. Traditional control paradigms often treat the “brain” and the “body” as separate entities. The emerging field of Embodied Control challenges this dichotomy by asserting that intelligence and stability emerge from the dynamic interplay between the controller, the physical structure, and the environment. This Special Issue explores how the physical properties of autonomous unmanned systems can be leveraged to simplify control laws, enhance resilience, and enable complex behaviors in unpredictable real-world scenarios. This approach is essential for the next generation of unmanned systems operating in high-uncertainty, unstructured, and dynamic environments. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Embodied intelligence and active, interactive planning and control.
• Control-aware embodied perception and state estimation.
• Decision-making and planning under control and safety constraints.
• Learning-enabled embodied control.
• Safety-critical and resilient embodied control architectures.
• Embodied multi-agent control and cooperation.
• Hierarchical and modular architectures for embodied intelligent control.
• Benchmarking, evaluation, and real-world validation of embodied control.

Dr. Guangtao Ran
Dr. Xiaodong Shao
Dr. Yizhuo Sun
Prof. Dr. Yanning Guo
Prof. Dr. Chuanjiang Li
Guest Editors

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• unmanned systems
• large language models
• intelligent control
• state estimation
• multi-agent systems
• trajectory planning