Cybersecure and Trustworthy Deployment of Drones and Autonomous Vehicles

Dear Colleagues,

Autonomous systems have recently witnessed an exponential growth in utilization for their contribution to promoting life quality. One such example of autonomous systems is unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which find uses in civil and military fields including but not limited to, scientific expeditions, agriculture, and search and rescue missions. Autonomous vehicles have also received their fair share of research with applications to transportation services, advancing safety, optimizing traffic management, and improving convenience and accessibility, especially for users with disabilities. This growth of autonomous systems factors in the continued demand for automation and the rapid advancement in enabling software and hardware technologies. To this end, significant efforts were dedicated to developing schemes for improving navigation, control, and telecommunication protocols to facilitate autonomous operation. Nevertheless, few have explored the cybersecurity challenges that potentially compromise autonomous systems, which in some cases, may result in catastrophic consequences. In other words, cybersecurity research with applications to autonomous systems is still in its infancy and requires further efforts for tackling the associated cyberattacks such as denial of service location spoofing, and malicious message injection, to name a few.

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.

Dr. Khair Ayman Al-Shamaileh
Prof. Dr. Naima Kaabouch
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Drones is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• artificial intelligence 
• autonomous systems 
• cybersecurity 
• hardware integration 
• signal processing 
• unmanned aerial vehicles 
• vehicle-to-vehicle communications