ETRI Journal Special Issue on Autonomous Unmanned Aerial/Ground Vehicles and their Application

Unmanned vehicles are rapidly being used for time-consuming, complicated, and dangerous tasks previously performed by humans. However, fully autonomous unmanned vehicles are barely feasible and still have various operational limitations, such as high-precision sensing, high computational complexity, low autonomy, and restricted mobility. For an unmanned vehicle to be fully autonomous, several technologies, such as precise pose estimation, environment mapping, path planning, trajectory generation, and object detection/tracking, must be applied with advances in sensors and embedded processors as well as mobility management.
When fully autonomous operation becomes possible with the development of these technologies, their applications will become more diverse. At present, unmanned vehicles are mainly used in basic surveillance, photography, and delivery, where a skilled human operator must intervene in the entire operation process. However, autonomous unmanned vehicles are expected to have a greater impact on our daily lives in the future in mobility management, smart agriculture, search and rescue, security, and advanced natural disaster surveillance.
By considering such a trend of technology developments and expansion of usage, the current special issue is seeking studies dealing with, but not limited to, the following issues:


• Perception
• Localization and mapping
• Path/Motion planning and obstacle avoidance
• Mobility management
• Navigation, guidance, and control
• Sensor fusion for UAV/UGV
• Communications for UAV/UGV
• Multi-vehicle systems
• Autonomous UAV/UGV applications


Important Dates
- Paper submission due: March 24, 2023
- First decision: May 30, 2023
- Final decision: July 30, 2023
- Publication: October 12, 2023

Paper Submission
Papers should be submitted at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/etrij and should adhere to the journal’s Author Guidelines.

Section Editor
Jin Seek Choi, Hanyang University, Rep. of Korea

Guest Editors
Hirozumi Yamaguchi, Osaka University, Japan
Jun Hwan Lee, ETRI, Rep. of Korea
Joongheon Kim, Korea University, Rep. of Korea
Yu-Cheol Lee, Dongguk University, Rep. of Korea

The Editorial Office can be contacted at etrij@etri.re.kr