Advanced Technologies and Applications for Unmanned Systems

Dear Colleagues,

At present, unmanned vehicles (e.g., robots, self-driving cars, unmanned surface vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, drones, etc.) and intelligent systems are some of the most exciting and innovative technologies in the field of transportation. Unmanned vehicles and systems can share their detected information (e.g., physical surroundings, collision events, threat messages, etc.) with others via various communication systems (e.g., aircraft addressing and reporting systems, vehicular ad hoc networks, long-term evolution, 4G/5G mobile networks, etc.) for cooperation and coordination. Unmanned vehicles and systems play an increasingly important role in the national economy and human social life in many fields, such as traffic monitoring, disaster relief, anti-terror campaigns, and target acquisition. Compared with manned vehicles, unmanned vehicles can free humans from dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks and run facilities efficiently. With the advances in various computing models and control strategies, a greater number of researchers and practitioners have actively started focusing on the key technologies and intelligent applications of unmanned systems. Moreover, with the integration of artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, signal processing, and other technologies, many intelligent applications of autonomous unmanned vehicles are fast-growing and widely applied. Advances in unmanned vehicles and unmanned systems affect every part of life, business, industry, and education, and become an important driver of benefit to many companies and organizations. The following Topic aims to bring together world-class researchers to present state-of-the-art research achievements and advances that contribute to unmanned systems in terms of advanced technologies and intelligent applications for self-driving cars, unmanned surface vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, etc. Review articles are also encouraged.

Potential topics to be included in this Topic include but are not limited to:

• Knowledge-based AI for vehicle perception, control, and decision-making;
• Artificial intelligence applications for autonomous vehicles;
• Data science in autonomous vehicle systems;
• Localization, mapping, and semantic segmentation for autonomous vehicles;
• Collaborative perception and control of vehicle swarms;
• High safety and reliability communication networks;
• Simulation and verification of autonomous vehicle systems;
• Task allocation and resource scheduling for multi-agent systems;
• Fault detection and diagnosis for autonomous vehicles;
• Human–robot interaction for autonomous robots/vehicles;
• Motion drive and teleoperation control for autonomous vehicles.

Dr. Jinchao Chen
Prof. Dr. Chao Chen
Prof. Dr. Yingjie Zhang
Topic Editors