Topic: Advanced Resilient Safety Control Methods for Unmanned Autonomous System Against Faults and Attacks

In-flight actuator/sensor faults and hacker attacks encountered by the unmanned autonomous system (UAS) may significantly impair the operation performance or even cause catastrophic accidents. Compared to single UASs, swarm UASs are usually adopted to improve task execution efficiency by distributing various payloads on multiple platforms. This operational approach necessitates the establishment of numerous communication links between neighboring UASs, which may be vulnerable to hacker attacks. Up to now, massive fault-tolerant control (FTC) methods have been developed for UASs to bolster operational safety against physical faults. However, the increasing safety requirements in complex flight situations make the FTC design a new challenge. Furthermore, concerning the cyber attacks faced by swarm UASs, only a limited number of studies have reported on the attack-tolerant control (ATC) methods aimed at achieving high-level security and safety, which needs further investigation. Therefore, this Special Issue will intensively explore the latest developments on the resilient safety control techniques for UASs. The topics covered include but are not limited to:

1. New fault/attack models of UASs; 

2. Intelligent resilient safety control methods of single UASs, such as approaches based on neural networks, reinforcement learning, deep learning, etc.; 

3. Integrated safety and security strategies against physical faults and cyber attacks; 

4. Resilient safety control strategies of swarm UASs against physical faults and cyber attacks.