Artificial Intelligence-Driven Drones Systems for Marine Engineering Applications
A special issue of Drones (ISSN 2504-446X). This special issue belongs to the section "Artificial Intelligence in Drones (AID)".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 April 2026 | Viewed by 682
Special Issue Editors
Interests: intelligent decision and control of UAVs; deep reinforcement learning; uncertain information processing; image processing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: research and application of intelligent marine equipment; Bayesian networks
Interests: multiagent theory; intelligent decision and control; reinforcement learning
Interests: unmanned surface vehicle; autonomous obstacle avoidance; path re-planning; velocity obstacle method; intelligent information systems; multi-agent collaborative decision-making
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The application of drones in marine engineering is becoming increasingly widespread, encompassing diverse areas such as ocean monitoring, meteorological observation, maritime communication coordination, facility inspection, resource exploration, and emergency rescue. The complex and volatile marine environment poses significant challenges to drones’ perception capabilities, communication stability, autonomous navigation, and real-time decision-making. To ensure safe and reliable operation, integrating advanced artificial intelligence technologies—such as computer vision, multimodal perception, reinforcement learning, and collaborative communication—to enhance the intelligence of drones in complex marine environments has become a prominent research trend. Furthermore, multi-platform collaboration across air and sea offers a new research direction for efficiently acquiring multi-source marine information.
This Special Issue seeks research papers focusing on the application of deep learning, reinforcement learning, and multimodal AI technologies to drone systems in marine engineering and offshore operations. We welcome high-quality original research and review articles, particularly those exploring the integration and innovative application of drone technology and artificial intelligence solutions in complex marine environments.
This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that link the following themes:
- Drone-Based Marine Environmental Perception and Mapping;
- Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Maritime Navigation and Decision-Making;
- Multimodal Sensor Fusion for Marine Monitoring;
- Vision-Based Detection, Tracking, and Segmentation of Marine Targets;
- Real-Time Scene Understanding and 3D Reconstruction in Marine Environments;
- Air–Sea Drone–Unmanned Surface Vehicle Collaboration;
- Robust Communication and Swarm Coordination in Low-Connectivity Maritime Environments;
- AI-Powered Drone Applications in Maritime Safety, Disaster Response, and Environmental Monitoring;
We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.
Prof. Dr. Bo Li
Prof. Dr. Jia Ren
Dr. Kaifang Wan
Dr. Yani Cui
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Drones is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- drone applications
- deep learning and reinforcement learning
- marine engineering
- vision-based perception
- multimodal perception
- environmental monitoring
- autonomous navigation
- air–sea coordination
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