Large Scale Cooperative Systems: Control Theory and Applications

Dear Colleagues, 

Over the past few years, we have seen increasing interest in the study of large-scale multi-vehicle systems, with applications in engineering and science problems. This interest is largely motivated by the advent of powerful and miniaturized embedded systems, sensors, and communication networks. For example, flight controllers have evolved from simple stability augmentation systems, barely enabling an external unexperienced pilot to remotely fly a multirotor unmanned aerial vehicle, to fully fledged command augmentation systems, opening up the possibilities of autonomous operations of large-scale cooperative systems.

This Special Issue aims at collecting new theory, developments, methodologies, and applications of large-scale multiple autonomous ground, marine, and aerial systems.

We welcome submissions that provide the community with the most recent advancements on all aspects of large-scale cooperative systems. These include, but are not limited to, multi-agent coordination, cooperative control, flocking, swarming and counter-swarming, consensus, formation, multi-agent motion planning and collision avoidance, cooperative learning, and graph-related theory. Also relevant are the applications of the theory developed in the areas of multi-vehicle systems for spacecraft, aerial vehicles, ground robots, and maritime vehicles. Such applications include multi-agent target localization, object recognition, search and rescue, communications, defense, and transportation, to mention but a few. 

This Special Issue is focused more on automation. Papers focused on drones may choose our joint Special Issue in Drones (ISSN 2504-446X, IF 5.532).

Dr. Venanzio Cichella
Prof. Dr. Isaac I. Kaminer
Dr. Claire Walton
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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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. Automation is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly 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 1000 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.

• multi-vehicle motion planning
• coordination
• multi-agent deconfliction
• formation control
• swarming
• estimation and localization by multiple robots