Autonomous Navigation Systems for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Dear Colleagues,

Autonomous navigation is a fundamental necessity for any application involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The global positioning system (GPS) and inertial measurements units (IMU), or their fused variant, the inertial navigation systems (INS), represent the most common approaches for addressing the problem of UAVs navigation. Nevertheless, cluttered, and GPS-denied, environments still pose a considerable challenge. Moreover, GPS-based navigation can be unreliable in several scenarios where precision maneuvers are required. This Special Issue is intended to contribute to the research area of autonomous navigation systems for UAVs.

Also, to control and navigate, UAVs require the use of several critical on-board sensors that can generate data enough to perform those tasks. The reading, treatment, processing, and understanding of this data in real time is another open issue that will be covered by this Special Issue. Finally, depending on the UAV usage, specific sensors and actuators will be needed to carry out the operation of the UAV. With these specific sensors and actuators, UAV can be used for many real applications, not only to carry cameras and taking pictures or movies. The proposal and use of new actuators on-board is of great interest in the robotics community. In this Special Issue, papers dealing with these problems will be welcome.

In this Special Issue proposal, potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Simultaneous localization and mapping;
• Visual odometry and visual-based navigation;
• GPS-denied methods;
• Cooperative navigation;
• SCLAM (simultaneous control localization and mapping);
• Control and state estimation for UAVs;
• Trajectory tracking;
• Tracking of dynamic targets;
• 3D mapping;
• Sensory system for flight control;
• Sensors and actuators in UAV for applications.

Dr. Rodrigo Munguia
Dr. Antoni Grau
Guest Editors

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