Application-Driven and Advanced Sensing and Control for Autonomous UAV Systems
A Special Issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220) belonging to the section "Vehicular Sensing".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 25 December 2026 | Viewed by 867
Editors
Interests: safety critical control systems design; fault detection observers design; UAV
Interests: robotics and autonomous systems; control systems; AI-based decision making and planning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: trajectory optimization; flight dynamics and control; dynamics modeling
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly being deployed in complex real-world applications such as infrastructure inspection, environmental monitoring, disaster response, precision agriculture, and urban mobility, among others. These applications impose requirements on sensing, autonomy, safety, and reliability. Moreover, UAVs often operate under uncertain, dynamic, and partially observable conditions. Recent advances in sensor technologies, embedded control algorithms, and communication systems have significantly expanded the capabilities of UAV platforms. However, despite this progress, many UAV systems still rely on off-the-shelf, existing, and coupled sensing and control architectures, which can limit their performance, robustness, and safety in demanding operational environments, especially considering the intended application.
Overall trends toward large-scale autonomous deployment, regulatory compliance, and safety-critical operation have highlighted the need for tighter integration between sensing, estimation, perception, and control. Application-driven UAV missions increasingly require strategies that are explicitly designed by task objectives (task-oriented), environmental constraints (perception awareness), and control requirements (performance requirements) and regulatory compliance (safety-guarantee), rather than generic pipelines. This shift requires new research at the intersection of advanced sensing, perception, estimation, and control, particularly in the context of safety-aware, perception-driven, and task-relevant autonomy. As UAV applications continue to expand in scale and societal importance, the development of sensing and control frameworks that are co-designed with application needs has become both timely and essential.
This Special Issue aims to present and disseminate recent advances in application-driven sensing and control methodologies for UAV systems. Particular focus will be paid to approaches that tightly integrate sensing, perception, estimation, and control to meet the demands of real-world UAV applications. We welcome contributions that address theoretical developments, algorithmic frameworks, and experimental validations that demonstrate how the aforementioned aspects can be jointly designed to enhance autonomy, safety, and performance. Emphasis will also be placed on works that bridge the gap between sensing technologies and control objectives, including perception-aware control, task-relevant sensing, and safety-critical autonomy.
Topics of interest for publication include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Application-driven design of UAV sensing and control architectures;
- Perception-aware and perception-driven control for UAVs;
- Multi-modal sensing, sensor fusion, and state estimation for autonomous UAVs;
- Task-oriented sensing and observer design;
- Safety-critical and constraint-based control (e.g., CBFs, BLFs) for UAV systems;
- Vision-based and learning-assisted sensing for UAV control;
- Experimental validation and real-world deployment of UAV sensing and control systems.
Dr. Hamed Habibi
Dr. Amirmehdi Yazdani
Dr. D. M. K. K. Venkateswara Rao
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- UAV
- sensor fusion
- application-driven design
- perception-aware control
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