New Trends in the Development of Intelligent Unmanned System Control

Dear Colleagues,

Intelligent unmanned systems are rapidly transforming modern society by extending autonomous perception, decision-making and control capabilities across aerial, ground, maritime and space platforms. Driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence, multi-agent coordination, edge computing and cyber–physical systems, these platforms can now operate with unprecedented autonomy, robustness and adaptability in complex environments. Such developments are fundamentally reshaping next-generation applications, ranging from logistics and urban mobility to disaster response, smart agriculture and planetary exploration.

This Special Issue aims to present original research and comprehensive reviews highlighting emerging trends, enabling technologies and practical innovations in the control of intelligent unmanned systems. We invite contributions addressing theoretical foundations, algorithmic advances, system integration and field deployment. Particular emphasis will be placed on studies demonstrating measurable improvements in control performance, safety, scalability and real-world operational effectiveness.

The following themes are representative, but by no means exhaustive:

• Frameworks for unmanned aerial, ground, surface, underwater and space systems.
• Learning-based trajectory optimization in uncertain or dynamic environments.
• Multi-agent coordination, task allocation, swarm intelligence and cooperative control.
• Vision–language–action (VLA) models, foundation models and world models for unmanned autonomy.
• SLAM, localization and sensor fusion for autonomous operations in complex scenarios.
• Real-time control and onboard decision-making for resource-constrained platforms.
• Sim-to-real transfer, digital twins and reinforcement learning for system control.
• Deployments in smart cities, disaster response, agriculture, logistics and infrastructure management.

Collectively, the articles in this Special Issue will provide a timely overview of the latest scientific and technological milestones in intelligent unmanned system control. Furthermore, this collection seeks to identify open challenges regarding autonomy, reliability and human trust, while fostering interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers in robotics, AI, control engineering, computer vision and intelligent transportation.

Dr. Soohwan Song
Guest Editor

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