Computers and Electrical Engineering Special issue on Recent trends in flocking control and communication for Unmanned vehicles
摘要截稿:
全文截稿: 2018-06-04
影响因子: 2.663
期刊难度:
CCF分类: 无
中科院JCR分区:
• 大类 : 计算机科学 - 3区
• 小类 : 计算机:硬件 - 3区
• 小类 : 计算机:跨学科应用 - 3区
• 小类 : 工程:电子与电气 - 3区
Overview
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) allow operators to perform various critical missions without human crew on board. Their popularity has been growing for monitoring, inspection and mapping of geographic areas, also due to the recent appearance in the market of small, low cost vehicles as multirotors (the so-called “drones”), that provide high performance and are equipped with low-cost sensors and control boards, as well as high capacity batteries. Such Unmanned Vehicles (UMVs) can be controlled remotely or can move autonomously, gather data by suitable sensors (e.g. cameras, thermographic sensors, laser-scanners, etc.), and they are provided with proper communication modules that allow them to exchange data with peers and/or send data to some base stations.
The use of multiple Unmanned Vehicles (UMVs) organized into a team (e.g. flock or swarm) has become an established practice that allows engineers to reduce mission times and improve fault-tolerance, as a single vehicle can be easily replaced by one of its ``neighbours’’. Therefore, designing appropriate control models holding some desired properties, such as robustness, efficiency, and stability, is nowadays crucial for a growing number of applications. A control model shows a certain level of robustness when the team does to not incur in particular undesired events under certain conditions (e.g. collisions caused by wind or stall due to obstacles at a certain positions). A control model shows efficiency if it leads the flock to perform the activity with the lowest amount of energy, while it is proved to be stable if it does not lead the team to show undesired emergent behaviours during the mission (such as flock partitioning).
Focus of the Special Issue:
This special issue will be of interest to a broad community of both scientists (from many disciplines like Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Control Systems to name a few) as well as practitioners from the industry and institutions because it aims at providing a unified platform for understanding limitations and potentialities in current systems to control UMVs. In order to highlight the interest around the topic, it could be mentioned that the research program launched in 2015 the U.S. Office of Naval Research, named LOCUST (Low-Cost Unmanned aerial vehicle Swarming Technology), that relies on “information-sharing between the UAVs, autonomous collaborative behavior in either defensive or offensive missions”.
Despite recent advancements in the design and implementation of UMVs, many relevant questions of huge practical impact -- including the design of optimal control systems for UMVs, the implementation of efficient communication and coordination protocols, the optimisation for power consumption and weight, the safety aspects for both humans and vehicle themselves, the applicability of existing solutions to an ever increasing range of domains -- are left unanswered. This special issue may attract experts from many areas to deal with (and provide) original and innovative solutions to the scientific questions we mentioned above.
Authors are invited to submit outstanding and original unpublished research manuscripts focused on important requirements such as efficiency, fault-tolerance, stability and robustness and UAV/UGV communication network approaches that would adapt to high mobility, dynamic topology and power constraints. Moreover, contributions concerning learning process for adaptive control and swarm intelligence in general are also welcome. The issue will also emphasize the presentation of innovative aspects related to the design of suitable control models for collective behavior of unmanned vehicles under certain constraints -- e.g. specific vehicles -- or particular requirements emerging from certain environmental conditions. Both theoretical and experimental aspects are welcome.
The topics of interest are:
● Studies, surveys and reports about novel solutions for UAV/UGV communication networks and routing protocols.
● Green networking for UAV/UGV.
● Design of mobility-induced sensors and network protocols.
● Solutions to improve robustness on high dynamic and networks of UAV/UGV.
● Middlewares for interoperability and integration of subsystems and control algorithms on UAV/UGV.
● Mobility-tolerant sensors aggregation and virtual sensing.
● Design of new devices, hardware components and models for UAV/UGV.
● Optimality for data capture and processing.
● Security on UAV/UGV.
● Models, architectures and case studies about Fog Computing support for team of UAV/UGV.
● Control models for collective behaviours of UAV/UGV.
● Fault-tolerance and scalability for behavioural models of UAV and UGV.