Advances in Perception, Communications, and Control for Drones

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, the field of drones has witnessed significant advancements and has broad applications in various industries, including agriculture, delivery services, surveillance, and entertainment. Perception, communications, and control capabilities are the key aspects of autonomy for drones, which enable them to operate tasks in an efficient and intelligent manner without human intervention. Inevitably, drones will also be placed in more challenging conditions and show their great potential in the future, such as observing and understanding complex environments by their sensors on-board, operating path planning and navigation under their perception conditions, multiple or swarms of drones working in a cooperative mode under communication constraints, etc. Quite a few perception, communications, and control problems are still far from being completely solved. We believe recent advancements in this topic could bring a revolution to their capabilities and applications, opening up new possibilities for safer, more efficient, and intelligent operation.

The Special Issue solicits key theoretical and practical contributions to perception, communications, and control for drones, aiming to showcase the latest developments and cutting-edge research in this fast-evolving field.

This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that link (but not limited to) the following themes:

• Advanced perception techniques of object detection and tracking for drones;
• Drones remote sensing for mapping and surveying;
• Real-time collision detection and avoidance for drones;
• Perception-aware target tracking of drones;
• Path planning and navigation of drones;
• Cooperative control of multiple drones;
• Coupling mechanism between control and communication of drones;
• Control theory under communication constraint of drones;
• Efficient communications for drone swarms;
• Robust formation control algorithms of drones;
• Communication-oriented control optimization of drones;
• Robust or adaptive control design for drones.

We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.

Dr. Zhihong Liu
Dr. Shihao Yan
Dr. Yirui Cong
Dr. Kehao Wang
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-anonymized 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.