Unmanned Aerial Systems

Autonomous control of Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) is that UASs can make decisions in the flight and carry out missions autonomously according to the scheduled tasks and rules through online sensing the surrounding situation. Through cooperation, UASs can share information among individual agents and work together to accomplish complicated mission which would not be possible for a single agent otherwise. With the development of UAS technology, autonomous control has become one of the hot topics and key technologies in UAS research field. The applications of UASs cover a broad spectrum of domains including scientific explorations in space and underwater far beyond human reach, life rescue in dangerous and hazardous environments, formation flight, cooperative foraging and coverage of a given area, multi-target observation, swarming and flocking. Due to the highly dynamic and uncertain environment in which mission is executed and the complexity of flight mission, improving the capability of autonomous control is one of the most important objectives for the development of UAS technologies.This ebook aims to present readers with some recent significant achievements on autonomous control of UAS. Ten excellent papers have been accepted in this ebook covering up-to-date advances in theoretical design and applications of this research topic.