Editorial: The Inaugural Issue of Unmanned Systems

Unmanned systems are physical devices or systems equipped with necessary data processing units, sensors, automatic control, and communications systems that can perform desired tasks in unstructured environments without continuous human guidance. A fully autonomous unmanned system has the ability to gain information about and navigate through an environment, to work for an extended period without human intervention, to move either all or part of itself throughout its operating environment without human assistance, and to avoid situations that are harmful to people, property, or itself unless those are part of its design specifications. An unmanned system may also learn or gain new capabilities like adjusting strategies for accomplishing its tasks or adapting to changing surroundings. Research on unmanned systems has gained much attention in recent years in the academic and military communities worldwide. Objects like unmanned aircraft, underwater exploiters, satellites, intelligent robots, and other unconventional structures are widely investigated as they have potential applications in the military and civilian domains. These unmanned systems are expected to have many capabilities. For example, they need to be able to sense and avoid friendly obstacles and also noncooperative obstacles. They need to have the ability to continue to operate in the event communications and/or GPS fail. Depending on the type of the vehicle they may have to operate in urban and indoor environments. There are numerous such challenges that they have to deal with in various situations. No one can anticipate all possible occurrences and build-in infinite number of contingencies into the design. The challenge is how to design unmanned system that can operate in an environment where unexpected events happen. Unmanned system design has to include traditional inner-loop control design along with algorithms for performing higher level functions such as decision making and task scheduling. This needs to be accomplished using reliable sensors, intelligent user/operator interfaces, information management and verifiable software. Even though it is a rapid growing area, we find that there is a lack of existing journals that cover all the topics related to unmanned systems. Research findings and results related to unmanned systems are published all over the places. We find that there is an urgent need to establish a new journal devoting its entire scope to the development of unmanned systems. With the help and support from the World Scientific Publishing Company and with a long and intensive preparation, we are proud to present this inaugural issue of Unmanned Systems. Unmanned Systems aims to publish high quality research and review articles in all subjects related to the development of automatic machine systems, which include advanced technologies in unmanned hardware platforms (aerial, ground, underwater and unconventional platforms), unmanned software systems, energy systems, modeling and control, communications systems, computer vision systems, sensing and information processing, navigation and path planning, computing, information fusion, multi-agent systems, mission management, machine intelligence, artificial intelligence, and innovative application case studies. Featured in this inaugural issue are six research and one review manuscripts from the world renowned research groups in the fields. We highlight the key contribution of each article in the following. The work by Kang and Prasad presents the development and flight-testing of an obstacle avoidance system that can provide a rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) the autonomous obstacle field navigation capability in uncertain environment. The system is composed of a sensor, an obstacle map generation algorithm from sensor measurements, an online path planning algorithm, and an adaptive vehicle controller. The novel approach of path planning presented in the paper is the integration of a newly developed receding horizon trajectory optimization scheme with a global path searching algorithm. The developed system is implemented within the Georgia Tech UAV Simulation Tool (GUST) and on the onboard computer of the Georgia Unmanned Systems, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2013) 1 2 #.c World Scientific Publishing Company DOI: 10.1142/S2301385013010012