Intelligent Cooperative Technologies of UAV Swarm Systems
A special issue of Drones (ISSN 2504-446X). This special issue belongs to the section "Artificial Intelligence in Drones (AID)".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 August 2026
Special Issue Editors
Interests: control systems engineering; electrical engineering; aerospace engineering
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: swarm intelligence; collaborative control; collaborative guidance; collaborative decision-making planning; UAV swarm; UAV flight control and embedded system
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: drones; autonomous navigation; motion planning; environmental perception; robot swarm; SLAM
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Due to the broad applications of UAV swarm systems, e.g., cooperative surveillance, coordination transportation, etc., it has become increasingly important to investigate intelligent coordination theory and technology so as to greatly improve the mission execution efficiency of UAV swarm systems. However, with the increasing complexities associated with operating and task requirements, an unmanned swarm system requires a series of advanced methods with higher efficiency, greater generalization ability and better adaptability than traditional algorithms. The artificial intelligence (AI)-based intelligent cooperative technologies of UAV swarm systems have been becoming a common potential solution to manage the above requirements, recently attracting much attention. Thus, how to develop AI-driven intelligent cooperative technologies to realize the organic collaboration of AI-enabled perception and cognition, navigation and positioning, decision-making and planning, control and optimization, evaluation and verification, etc., is a hot topic of current academia and industry.
The goal of this Special Issue is to collect papers (original research articles and/or review papers) that provide insights about the intelligent cooperative technologies of UAV swarm system. This subject is of significance and relevance to Drones as UAV swarm systems leverage AI-driven intelligent cooperative technologies to enable unmanned aerial vehicles to complete complex tasks together autonomously and efficiently. These technologies are crucial for enhancing mission performance in complex and dynamic environments.
This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that link the following themes:
- AI-enabled intelligent cooperative perception and cognition;
- AI-enabled autonomous navigation and distributed localization in GNSS-denied environments;
- Intelligent cooperative decision-making and planning in complex and adversarial environments;
- Distributed learning, control, and optimization for UAV swarm systems;
- Cooperative/noncooperative/evolutionary games on UAV networks;
- UAV Swarm countermeasures and confrontation;
- Simulation and experiment verification for UAV swarm systems.
We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.
Prof. Dr. Mou Chen
Prof. Dr. Xiwang Dong
Dr. Fei Gao
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
- AI-enabled drones
- intelligent perception and cognition
- autonomous navigation and cooperative localization
- AI-enabled decision-making and planning
- countermeasures and confrontation
- learning-based control and optimization
- game-theoretical analysis
- security and resilience
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