Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, the field of unmanned systems has witnessed remarkable advancements, leading to the emergence of intelligent unmanned systems capable of perceiving, making decisions, and autonomously controlling their actions. These systems, often referred to as autonomous or intelligent unmanned systems, have revolutionized various industries, including transportation, agriculture, surveillance, and exploration. They have the potential to enhance efficiency, reduce human error, and perform tasks that are too dangerous or tedious for humans. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, have experienced significant advancements in recent years thanks to the integration of intelligent capabilities. These intelligent unmanned systems have revolutionized the field of UAVs, enabling a wide range of applications across various industries, such as aerial photography and videography, precision agriculture, search and rescue operations, infrastructure inspection, environmental monitoring, and so on.

At the core of these intelligent unmanned systems lie three fundamental components: perception, decision making, and control. Perception involves the ability to gather and interpret information from the environment using various sensors such as cameras, lidar, radar, and other specialized sensors. This information is then processed to create a representation of the system's surroundings, enabling it to understand and interact with the world. Once the perception phase is complete, the intelligent unmanned system moves on to the decision-making stage. These decisions can range from simple tasks, such as obstacle avoidance, to complex actions, such as route planning, target identification, or collaborative decision making in a multi-agent environment. Finally, the control component comes into play, where the intelligent unmanned system executes the decisions made during the decision-making phase.

The integration of perception, decision making, and control in intelligent unmanned systems is a highly interdisciplinary field, drawing upon expertise from various domains such as artificial intelligence, robotics, computer vision, machine learning, and control theory. Researchers and engineers in this field strive to develop algorithms, architectures, and techniques that enable unmanned systems to operate autonomously, adapt to dynamic environments, and interact safely and effectively with humans and other agents. The challenges in developing perception, decision-making, and control capabilities for intelligent unmanned systems are numerous. These include the need for robust and accurate perception algorithms, efficient and scalable decision-making frameworks, real-time control strategies, and the ability to handle uncertainty and unexpected situations.

In conclusion, the field of perception, decision making, and control of intelligent unmanned systems holds immense potential for transforming various industries and enabling a wide range of applications. As technology continues to advance, the development of robust and reliable algorithms and systems will pave the way for the deployment of intelligent unmanned systems that can operate autonomously, adapt to changing environments, and collaborate with humans and other agents effectively.

As technology continues to advance, we can expect further innovations in areas such as swarm intelligence, collaborative decision making, and enhanced autonomy, opening up new possibilities for UAVs in various industries and domains.

This Special Issue focuses on the design of intelligent drone systems, including research into control systems, artificial intelligence, decision- making, UAV modelling and simulation, etc. The aim of this Special Issue is to provide a venue for drones research on artificial intelligence, unmanned systems, robotics, automation, intelligent systems, etc. All papers will be published in an open access format following peer review.

Both research papers and overview papers are welcome. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Intelligence unmanned systems;
• Artificial intelligence;
• Robotics and automation;
• Machine learning;
• Safe learning;
• Formation control;
• Group formation tracking;
• Bipartite cooperative;
• SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping);
• Collaborative perception and positioning;
• Decision making;
• Drones;
• Path planning;
• Image fusion;
• Feature fusion;
• Sensor fusion;
• Scene understanding.

We are pleased to invite you to submit manuscripts to this MDPI Drones Special Issue on “Perception, Decision-Making and Control of Intelligent Unmanned System”.

Prof. Dr. Shuang Li
Dr. Chengchao Bai
Dr. Jinzhen Mu
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. Drones 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.