Advances in the Decision-Making and Control of Autonomous Marine Vehicles

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, autonomous marine vehicles (AMVs) have emerged as key enablers in a wide range of maritime applications, including environmental monitoring, seabed mapping, surveillance, search and rescue, sampling, and offshore infrastructure inspection. The increasing demand for long-duration missions in dynamic, uncertain, and GPS-denied environments has driven significant research and development in the areas of intelligent autonomy and real-time decision-making.

Despite notable progress, numerous technical challenges remain, particularly in achieving fully autonomous, persistent, and robust operations with minimal or no human intervention. These challenges include dynamic mission planning, fault tolerance, adaptation to unstructured environments, and safe interactions with other agents or infrastructure.

This Special Issue aims to present recent advances and pioneering research regarding the design, development, and implementation of decision-making, planning, and control systems for AMVs. The scope of this Special Issue includes a broad range of autonomous systems such as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs), and hybrid or multi-domain marine robots capable of operating across surface, underwater, or aerial environments.

We invite high-quality original research articles and review papers in, but not limited to, the following areas:

• Autonomous mission planning and dynamic replanning;
• Multi-vehicle task assignment and coordination;
• Guidance, path planning, and trajectory optimization;
• Motion planning and robust/adaptive control under uncertainty;
• AI/ML-based decision-making frameworks;
• Fault detection, resilience, and safe operation in harsh environments;
• Human-in-the-loop autonomy and shared control architectures;
• Real-time situational awareness and perception-driven control.

Dr. Amirmehdi Yazdani
Prof. Dr. Oleg Yakimenko
Dr. Somaiyeh MahmoudZadeh
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. Journal of Marine Science and Engineering 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.

• autonomous marine vehicles
• autonomous underwater vehicles
• autonomous surface vehicles
• intelligent control
• marine robotics
• path planning
• decision-making
• AI for marine systems
• multi-agent coordination
• resilient autonomy