Recent Advances in UAV Navigation

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, the number of potential applications for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has significantly increased. Current applications include environmental monitoring, surveillance, mapping, agriculture, aerial photography, infrastructure monitoring, search and rescue, and law enforcement, to name a few. For each of these applications, the UAVs operate in a unique environment (e.g., rural, urban, indoor) at various possible altitudes (e.g., high, low, very low). To support navigation and separation assurance during the various phases of flight knowledge regarding the UAV’s position, velocity, and attitude in the absolute sense (i.e., with respect to the geographic coordinate frame in which the routes and geofences are defined) and in the relative sense (i.e., with respect to other swarm members, other traffic, and objects in the environment), its performance must adhere to a set of requirements with respect to accuracy, integrity, availability, and continuity. This so-called required navigation performance depends on the operational environment and the phase of flight (e.g., en route, landing).

For many commercial UAVs, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) have become one of the most dependable solutions for position and navigation. However, in some operational environments such as the urban environment, GNSS may be unavailable, sparsely available, or significantly deteriorated due to shadowing and multipath of GNSS signals from objects and buildings, significant signal attenuation, or even intentional denial or deception. These effects could lead to hazardous misleading information that, if used for navigation, may result in an accident. Hence, monitors must be included to detect the occurrence of misleading information and mitigate its effects. In summary, to enable operation of UAVs at any time in any environment, a robust precision navigation that is not solely dependent on GPS is required.

To improve availability and guarantee continuity of service in, for example, GPS-challenged environments, GPS can be integrated with an IMU or have its sensitivity increased by using external data sources (i.e., assisted GPS). This integration strategy is successful in many cases but does not cover all possible scenarios. Alternative navigation technologies may include the integration of inertial sensors with imagery and laser scanners, beacon-based navigation (i.e., pseudolites, ultra-wideband), navigation using signals of opportunity (e.g., cellular signals, magnetic field), available information (e.g., terrain data urban maps, indoor maps), or novel integration approaches (e.g., application of explainable artificial intelligence). In addition to integrating onboard sensor information, UAVs may also collaborate with other UAVs operating in their vicinity to obtain a better navigation solution by exploiting the exchange of navigation-related information.

We would like to invite submissions on, but not limited to, the following subject areas:

• Integrated navigation approaches for UAV operation in challenging environments;
• Collaborative navigation and swarm navigation;
• Biologically inspired and cognitive navigation;
• Advances in vision- and laser-based navigation;
• Use of cellular signals for UAV navigation;
• Application of ultrawideband beacons;
• New navigation sensor technologies;
• Application of explainable artificial intelligence concepts in UAV navigation and how these methods address meeting required navigation performance;
• Integrity-monitoring approaches;
• Application of RNP concepts to UAV procedures;
• Navigation aspects of a UAV traffic management system.

Prof. Dr. Maarten Uijt de Haag
Guest Editor

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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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.