Calls for Papers and Abstracts

The special issue focuses on theory and technology to support efficient, safe and sustainable UAM operations, including the new energy power and propulsion, the design and control of aircraft, airspace monitoring and navigation, air traffic management, integration of multimodal transportation, economic, environment, and equity impact of UAM, etc. Authors are invited to submit the manuscript to this special issue and contribute to this promising research field. ll the published papers will be electronically available on the ScienceDirect of the Elsevier.

Paper submission deadline: 30 April 2023

Organised by EASN and the University of Salerno, the conference will include several plenary talks by distinguished personalities of the European aviation and space sectors from academia, industry, the research community, and policymakers. It will also include thematic sessions, along with technical workshops where innovative ideas, breakthrough concepts, and disruptive technologies will be presented and discussed with the aim of establishing new research partnerships and possible synergies. EASN will provide a forum for EU-funded projects' activities to present achieved goals, discuss current trends and future needs, and identify possible collaborations with each other. In this respect, the three-day technical programme will be an ideal platform for SESAR projects to present their activities and results, and discuss current trends and future needs of the ATM research sector.

After the Conference Proceedings, which will include all presented papers, a number of selected papers will be published in the international journal "Aerospace" following peer review. 

Abstract submission deadline: 15 May 2023
Paper submission deadline: 15 December 2023

The aim of this Special Issue is to promote cybersecurity awareness in autonomous systems by inviting original research articles that investigate the recent cybersecurity challenges, detection and mitigation methodologies, and research findings with applications to UAVs and autonomous vehicles. This Issue also aims to establish a broader impact by creating the foundation of cybersecurity research that benefits other research areas such as robotics.

Suggested themes of articles are those that address the aforementioned cybersecurity challenges and highlight novel state-of-the-art detection and countermeasure approaches. Such approaches may include artificial intelligence, image or video processing, signal processing, new or improved hardware modules (e.g., sensors, front-end circuitry), cooperative networking, vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and coding protocols.

Paper submission deadline: 20 May 2023

TRA is a major transport conference that covers all transport modes and discusses all aspects of mobility. The 2024 edition of TRA will take place in Dublin and the selected theme is Transport Transitions: Advancing Sustainable and Inclusive Mobility. TRA offers a rich and diverse conference experience, with extensive exhibitions, demonstrations and technical tours complementing the extensive conference programme. TRA offers an excellent opportunity for researchers, policymakers and industry representatives to come together and discuss how research and innovation are changing our transport and mobility system. The conference provides a unique opportunity to hear about the latest mobility advances across Europe and elsewhere, learn from industry achievements, and share best practices on policies and deployment.

Abstract submission deadline: 17 April 2023
Abstract submission extended deadline: 29 May 2023

Today, there is a growing need for flying drones with diverse capabilities for both civilian and military applications. There is also a significant interest in the development of novel drones, which can autonomously fly in different environments and locations and perform various missions. In the past decade, the broad spectrum of applications of these drones has received a great deal of attention, which led to the invention of a large variety of drones of different sizes and weights. Depending on the flight missions of the drones, the size and type of installed equipment are different. Considerable advantages afforded by the drones have led to a myriad of studies focusing on the optimization and enhancement of the drones’ performances. According to the mentioned characteristics, drones benefit from the potential to carry out a variety of operations, including reconnaissance, patrolling, protection, transportation of loads, and aerology. They can carry various sensors: visual, acoustic, chemical, and biological. Drones often vary widely in their configurations, depending on the platform and mission. Drones can perform both outdoor and indoor missions in very challenging environments. The applications of drones can be categorized in different ways. They can be based on the type of missions (military/civil), type of flight zones (outdoor/indoor), and type of environments (underwater/on the water/ground/air/space). This Special Issue invites submissions that discuss the novel applications of drones,

Paper submission deadline: 31 May 2023

Advances in navigation, control, as well as other enabling technologies from data handling to communication systems are necessary to safely meet the increased demand for autonomy. The state-of-the-art methods used to address challenges in single and distributed drone systems are often based on advances in the navigation and control theory, increasingly based on machine learning, or a combination of those two approaches, such as artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced navigation and control. Advances in new technologies such as the Internet of things and Detect and Avoid are also increasingly exploited to enhance navigation and control safety and performance.

This Special Issue will therefore bring together papers which describe recent research in the navigation, control and mission planning of drones, including ground, air, marine or space vehicles. Papers with theoretical, simulation and practical experimental results in this field are all encouraged. This includes review papers, tutorials, as well as original research papers.

Paper submission deadline: 31 May 2023

Recently, advanced artificial intelligence technologies have provided the opportunity for new drone applications, such as the surveillance, search and rescue, remote sensing, air pollution monitoring, precision agriculture, and aerial base stations. Therefore, there is a significant interest in the use of deep learning for various applications. However, artificial-intelligence-based methods are data-hungry and require a certain amount of meaningful available data to generate useful results. There, these methods are challenging to implement in drones due to limited resources. Thus, it is an urgent need to develop more advanced methods. This Special Issue intends to publish original research and review articles that discuss theoretical and practical results in relation to artificial intelligence in drones, with a particular focus on navigation, perception, wireless communication, decisions, control, and civil applications using artificial intelligence technologies.

Paper submission deadline: 31 May 2023

The use of drones (indoor and outdoor) can provide additional support in documentation activities and data interpretation. More specifically, drones can support the survey of those parts of buildings or sites that are not always easily accessible or inspectable (e.g., collapsed parts of a building due to earthquakes or simply roof or tall buildings challenging to access). Further, drones can provide solid support to developing a DT of the recorded objects or sites, allowing the development of 2D measured drawings and 3D models obtained either by integrating aerial data with those obtainable using ground survey instruments or simply by using UAV to survey and represent built environments.

Additionally, the resulting model can be implemented and updated during the various phases of the maintenance/restoration/reuse of a building or a site. Accordingly, the digital representation—acquired either by photogrammetry or LiDAR—can be used for dissemination and communication. Within this context, VR and AR play a key role. Consequently, submission of articles dealing with innovative approaches and new perspectives, as well as practical applications, addressed to a broad range of professionals working in the fields of documentation, surveying, representation, digitisation, visualisation, interpretation and simulation of complex scenarios, are welcomed.

Paper submission deadline: 31 May 2023

Due to their mobility, miniaturization, and flexible usage, UAVs have enabled a plethora of rapidly expanding applications in domains such as monitoring, search and rescue, telecommunications, agriculture, etc. UAV deployment in smart cities is promising for the provision of efficient delivery services, dynamically deployable mobile base stations for broadband hotspot connectivity, infrastructure inspection, and first-responder services, including in earthquakes, gas leakage, and explosions. However, the future prospects and ubiquity of drones in urban areas bring significant technical and societal challenges in privacy, cyber security, and public safety. Therefore, potential privacy, security, and safety concerns must be concurrently addressed with the development of full autonomy in drone operation via improvements in the performance, reliability, autonomy, and connectivity of UAV platforms.

This Special Issue welcomes high-quality papers detailing the latest research and application results in UAV development from experts in a wide array of fields, including navigation, autonomous control, secure localization, drone vision and sensing, nonlinear optimization models, and machine learning/artificial intelligence algorithms.

Paper submission deadline: 31 May 2023

Enhanced reliability, ubiquitous connectivity, and long-range radio coverage are required in fifth-generation (5G) and beyond 5G (B5G) communication services in the civilian and military domain; therefore, supplementing and extending the terrestrial and satellite communication infrastructure is of paramount importance. In this direction, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), widely known as drones, can act as autonomous communicating nodes, aerial relays, or even aerial base stations (BSs), and strongly support the conventional networks in propagation scenarios with obstacles and highly mobile and remote network nodes. By flying at modest altitudes, at high elevation angles, and across urban, suburban, and rural terrains, UAVs can facilitate the establishment of an adaptable and reliable multi-hop communication backbone, thus enabling the provision of challenging applications, including disaster and crisis management, agricultural, transportation, environmental monitoring, remote sensing, and healthcare services. Nevertheless, several scientific and technical challenges exist for enabling the successful and long-term operation of UAV-aided communication networks in highly dynamic and heterogeneous environments. Therefore, advanced communication, antenna, networking, sensor, and computing technologies should be proposed, revised, and developed.

This Special Issue aims to disseminate the latest research results and innovations in the ambiguous landscape of UAV-aided communication networks.

Paper submission deadline: 31 May 2023

Due to their incredible potential in both military and civilian applications, such as recognition, inspection, mining, precision agriculture, vigilance, and emergency aid, which call for drones that can evolve in a stable form and adapt to the operating environment, these topics have been under constant development.  To ensure mission success, the majority of applications require robust and reliable solutions and algorithms, in addition to creative drone designs. The Special Issue encompasses both theoretical and experimental avenues pertinent to different drone configurations including fixed-wing drones , multirotors, drone formations, and unconventional (convertible) drones, etc. It aims to provide a venue for multi-disciplinary researchers working in the domain of drones. We strongly believe that a wider dissemination of research developments in this domain is instrumental to stimulate more exchanges and collaborations among the research community and to contribute to further advancements. 

Suggested themes: Fundamental research on drones, futuristically applied research on drones, emerging algorithms for drones, hardware and software for drones, administrative perspective of drones.

Paper submission deadline: 31 May 2023

During the past few years, an ever-growing number of UAV applications has been witnessed in wireless systems. By leveraging the advancement of its great flexibility, UAV-assisted networks can provide ubiquitous wireless connectivity for enormous services (e.g., environment monitoring, emergency rescue and cargo transportation). In the next generation of wireless networks, diverse demands with even more stringent requirements are emerging with the assistance of UAVs as high-mobility aerial communication platforms. However, to fulfill such requirements, there are both analytical and practical challenges which need to be overcome. Moreover, the system performance of next-generation UAV-assisted wireless networks is likely characterized by the combination of performance indicators. For instance, low-latency data transmission and task computation are both mandatory for mission-critical task offloading with highly mobile UAVs. To support real-time sensor–controller–actuator data exchange, both reliability and freshness must be taken into account while the UAV has to cover the entire distributed area. Therefore, to realize the full potential of next-generation UAV-assisted wireless networks, we need to identify diverse technologies and investigate novel design methodologies.

In view of this, this Special Issue aims to analyze the fundamental limits of next-generation UAV-assisted wireless networks under practical scenarios, while focusing on both theoretical and practical designs with state-of-the-art technologies.

Paper submission deadline: 31 May 2023

The 9^th IEEE International Smart Cities Conference (ISC2 2023) will be held on 24 – 27 September 2023 at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania. This premier Smart Cities conference will bring together practitioners, city policymakers and administrators, infrastructure operators, industry representatives and researchers from Europe and all over the world. The aim of the conference is to provide an international forum for experts to promote and present technologies and applications and to share their experiences & views with current and future  Smart Cities applications. ISC2-2023 will feature keynotes, plenary sessions, panels, industry exhibits, paper and poster presentations, and also tutorials by worldwide experts on Smart Cities.

Paper submission deadline: 24 April 2023
Paper submission extended deadline: 5 June 2023

The beginning of the 2020s finds connected multimodality at the forefront of urban mobility transformation. Cities grow larger (It is expected that Europe's population in urban areas will increase from today's 74% to about 83.7% in 2050 and increasingly face problems caused by transport and traffic (Congestion costs nearly 2% of the EU’s GDP annually, while 85% of the EU’s urban population is exposed to fine particulate matter PM2.5 at levels deemed harmful to health ^[2]). To face this challenge, cities increasingly strive to implement SUMPs (Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans) to increase the quality of life in their areas and encourage economic growth. Meanwhile, Urban Air Mobility (UAM) offers a promising opportunity to mitigate road (surface) congestion by integrating an additional modality/dimension in the urban mobility landscape. Nonetheless, on the path to fully urban operations of capable automated autonomous aircrafts and integrated UAM services, still plenty of questions remain open. This Special Issue aims to provide a platform for bringing together research advances made over the recent years in the domain of urban air mobility.

Paper submission deadline: 30 June 2023

The seamless integration of unmanned traffic management (UTM) and air traffic management (ATM) is critical to fully unlocking the potential benefits of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) applications. Alongside the integration of UTM with the ATM system, an emerging Urban Air Mobility (UAM) focusing on passenger or cargo-carrying air transportation using specific corridors within an urban environment aims to further expand such integration towards the concept of Advanced Air Mobility. The Special Issue addresses the broad topics related to Advanced Air Mobility.

Paper submission deadline: 30 June 2023

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are on the verge of becoming an integral part of our life, with their market predicted to witness remarkable growth in the 2023–2030 period. The continuous proliferation of UAVs and evolving complexity of tasks impose significant demands on computing and communication infrastructures, which are resource-constrained in terms of the UAV computing power and UAV-to-cloud communication bandwidth. The miniaturization of UAV form factors, dynamic operating scenarios, higher performance requirements and cybersecurity considerations further exacerbate these demands. Edge computing is a computing paradigm in which computation is mostly performed on power-constrained devices with limited processing capabilities or on-premise datacenters. By pushing computing resources to edge computing in closer proximity to UAVs, it enables low-latency service delivery for safety and mission-critical UAV applications.

This Special Issue aims to publish the latest contributions in the development of software and hardware for UAV mobile edge computing to advance their real-time, energy-efficient, adaptative, reliable, reconfigurable and predictable performance. Researchers, developers and industry practitioners working in this area are invited to present their views on current trends, challenges and state-of-the-art solutions addressing various challenges and issues in UAV mobile edge computing.

Paper submission deadline: 30 June 2023

Transportation of humans and goods has become an incredibly challenging task worldwide, both in metropolitan centers and rural regions. The answer to this is the use of urban airspace involving unmanned aircraft systems. The concept is highly promising, and the first successful trials have already been performed worldwide. The UAS integration community has recognized the interdisciplinarity of the task, as well as the resulting demand of regulatory and business models and actions or local, regional, national, and international level. The main challenge is the integration of advanced air mobility in terms of its operation in the airspace into the established mobility systems and processes—general aviation, ground mobility, etc. With this, advanced air mobility shall soon become a common type of mobility.

This Special Issue of Drones is to be understood as a foresight analysis on the overall AAM system—its development, integration, and operation. Moreover, it is dedicated to the regulatory, including standardization, and process management aspects of the successful, safe, and sustainable integration of UAS into the urban airspace and the existing multimodal mobility and transport systems.

Paper submission deadline: 30 June 2023

Drones have proven to have significant potential in supporting the condition assessment of civil infrastructure and contribute to more efficient maintenance procedures. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can function as flexible platforms for carrying high-quality digital data acquisition equipment such as image sensors of different spectral ranges, lidar scanners, and GPR as well as further surveying and non-destructive testing devices. They can be operated semi or fully autonomously and thus perform extensive data generation operations near large structures very efficiently. The processing of acquired sensor data can support digital modeling of existing structures, provide deep insight into the structure’s condition and through repeated and systematic flights pave the way to modern data-driven and predictive maintenance strategies. Furthermore, drones can be applied in the context of infrastructure planning for early site investigations or construction progress monitoring. Finally, drones have proven to be very efficient in the management of seismic events and other natural disasters both for early damage assessment and for the safe survey of damaged buildings in order to plan the recovery or restoration of damaged historical buildings.

The enormous potential of UAVs in civil infrastructure requires further scientific developments and the implementation and validation of suitable workflows for ensuring safe, goal-oriented, quality-controlled, and optimized flight operations and data analysis. This Special Issue is aimed at showcasing contributions to the application of UAVs in relation to civil infrastructure on the methodological level as well as on successful and novel applications.

Paper submission deadline: 31 July 2023

UAVs have a growing role in both civil and military operations, and their applications motivate a series of new operations research (OR) problems. This Special Issue aims to collect the recent advances in this broad topic, including the modeling and optimization methods. In typical operations research on UAVs, they are formulated as optimization problems, including objective functions, decision variables and the set of feasible solutions. Different types of OR problems need to be investigated under different application scenarios of UAVs. They might include drone route planning problems in logistic, path planning problems in area coverage, location routing problems with base stations, or drone deployment problems in communication relay. UAVs can also be employed with traditional vehicles, e.g., truck–drone cooperated delivery, which motivates more complex OR problems. Many OR problems for UAVs, such as routing, scheduling and deployment, are NP-hard and difficult to solve, and thus intelligent algorithms usually have to be designed for solving these problems. In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to, the following: routing problems for drones or cooperated drones and other vehicles, e.g., truck and drone cooperated delivery; deployment optimization for drones in communication and networking; multi-drone scheduling problem; path planning problem for drones in complex environment; OR applications of drones considering policies and regulations, such as maximum flight altitude, maximum payload and no-fly zones; energy evaluation and management for drone applications; dynamic systems with drones, such as dynamic customer requests or on-demand delivery; behavior of drone-aided systems under uncertainty; intelligent algorithms for solving OR problem with drones.

Paper submission deadline: 14 August 2023

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) have undergone increasing investigation in various research and service areas to support humans and enhance operations. In the future, it is expected that airspace in the metropolitan environment will be shared with traditional low- or very low-flying manned and unmanned vehicles (e.g., unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) or urban air mobility (UAM) vehicles such as aerial taxis) that cover a wide range of services. In this sense, many challenges in this research area must be addressed to enable the implementation of critical UAS operation and services. These innovations could help to drive the growth of UASs and open new opportunities for their use in various industries and sectors.

This Special Issue aims to present the latest advanced technologies and services for the next generation of UASs, which could pave the road towards reliable, autonomous, safe, and sustainable operations. The state-of-the-art methods used to address the challenges and requirements of the next generation of UASs are based on advances in communications, navigation, control, and autonomy. The editorial team of this Special Issue seeks original, unpublished, and high-quality research papers on the topics discussed above.

Paper submission deadline: 31 August 2023

The scope of this Special Issue is to report novel research findings which tackle and remove the obstacles that prevent the use of drones for the improvement of human health. These barriers are associated with meeting aviation and healthcare regulatory standards, the maintenance of the quality of the medicine, the integration of the drone service within business-as-usual medical logistics, the engagement of the community, the development of robust use cases and the generation and sharing of relevant data. Therefore, the editors of this Special Issue seek papers which cover successful drone operations in hard-to-reach communities, developments in safety and aircraft technologies which are focused on meeting the requirements of medical logistics between hospitals, clinics and, where possible, directly to the point-of-care and the patient. Novel studies which are associated with maintenance of the medicine, medical product or patient sample quality and stability are welcome. Additionally, the submission of papers which evaluate how patients and communities interact with drone medical logistics services is encouraged. Research showing how drone platforms may be instrumented to allow the testing of patients at the point-of-care, within their communities, are also welcome.

All contributions to the Special Issue must include thorough experimental design and the appropriate sampling to allow the statistical evaluation of the research findings. All papers are encouraged to adhere to the FAIR principles of generating experimental data, these are findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability. In particular, all papers reporting results based on the analysis of captured data are urged to include the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) for where these data can be accessed

Paper submission deadline: 1 September 2023

UAV drone technology is constantly evolving with new innovation in circuit boards, chipset, peripherals, and software, resulting in more advanced drones on the market every few months. Drones are used for aerial photography, express shipping and delivery, search and rescue, geographic mapping, surveillance, and so on. Research on the design, data processing, and applications of drones or general unmanned vehicle systems are of great importance.

This Special Issue aims to report the most recent research results in UAV control and data processing. Papers on UAV tracking and control, UAV image-based object detection, UAV applications, and general machine learning algorithms are all welcome. This Special Issue is within the scope of Drones.

Paper submission deadline: 15 September 2023

This special issue proposal aims to bring together the latest advancements in multimodal synchronization and integration, including truck-drone, rail-drone, and truck and rail-drone integration, in the context of future transportation systems. They are looking to showcase innovative methodologies for strategic planning, tactical management, and operational control, leveraging emerging technologies such as data-driven decision support, AI-based machine learning, and large-scale simulation and optimisation with supercomputing. 

Paper submission deadline: 15 September 2023

UAVs are required not only to have intelligent decision-making abilities so as to adapt to unknown environments, but also to have good flight control performance in complex dynamic environments. Therefore, the intelligent decision-making technologies and the safe flight control schemes of UAVs in complex dynamic environments need to be fully considered in the future research into UAVs.

The journal focuses on the design and applications of drones, including research into control systems, artificial intelligence, mission planning and performance analysis, etc. This Special Issue on “Advanced Intelligent Decision-Making and Flight Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles” will cover a broad spectrum of topics related to advanced intelligent decision-making and flight control, focusing on new problems encountered in the research into UAVs.

This Special Issue aims to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners in the fields of decision-making and intelligent control on UAVs to disseminate their new ideas and research results. At the same time, the themes of “The 6th International Symposium on Autonomous Systems” are related to the Special Issue. Thus, we encourage the authors of outstanding original articles accepted for the conference to submit extended versions of their papers to this Special Issue. This Special Issue is also an open call for other high-quality papers in this research field, though the authors who wish to contribute directly to the Special Issue are in principle required to register for the conference and present their published work at the conference.

Paper submission deadline: 30 September 2023

Urban transportation has been a growing and lingering problem for cities under the process of urbanization, and congestions and emissions are the two major side effects along the way. Thanks to the recent developments in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), e.g., drones and electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicles, the emerging concept of advanced low-altitude transportation (ALT) drives a new era for future transportation, which has the potential to fundamentally solve the inherent problems. At the same time, this new transportation mode is moving faster than most imagine.

Paper submission deadline: 1 November 2023

The Drones Special Issue is inspired by “The 2023 Int´l Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems”, which will be held on June 6–9, 2023, in Warsaw, Poland. The most exciting and innovative papers presented at ICUAS 2023 will be selected to be extended and recommended to this Special Issue. Additionally, they invite others to contribute by submitting articles concerning their recent research, experimental work, reviews, and/or case studies.

Paper submission deadline: 30 November 2023