On the Design and the Digital Implementation of Controllers for Unmanned Vehicles

Dear Colleagues,

In the last decade, there has been an increasing research interest in developing control techniques for Unmanned Vehicles (UVs), thanks to their capability to perform complex tasks in dangerous situations where human intervention is prevented. More recently, great attention has been also focused on the use of multiple UVs as an organized swarm that can significantly increase the performances of a single UV, as well as of an overall group. As a matter of fact, the use of UVs is recently growing in several fields, ranging from military and rescue missions, remote sensing, and environmental surveillance to meteorology, logistics, and farming. For this reason, the study of UV control problems is, nowadays, of great appeal for researchers and companies. An important aspect to consider when researching controllers for UV design is the unavoidable presence of sampling and quantization in the digital devices when implementing the proposed control strategies. Moreover, constraints in the communication channels such as delays, intermittent communications, and limited channel communication are important issues to account for when the control logic is not embedded in the UV and implemented in external hardware. The research on such topics and the related application to the control problems of UVs are of great interest and is the objective of the present Special Issue. Submitted contributions, in the form of full-length articles or short communications, are expected to provide theoretical and practical results on the design of control strategies for UVs and their practical implementation on digital devices.

Dr. Domenico Bianchi
Dr. Mario Di Ferdinando
Guest Editors

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