International Workshop on Wireless Networking, Control and Positioning for Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles

Unmanned autonomous systems are increasingly used in a large number of contexts to support humans in dangerous and difficult-to-reach environments. Key areas of commercial aerial applications, such as inspection and logistics have gained attention lately and underline the potential of broad deployment of networked UAVs. In order to fulfill particularly challenging tasks, next-generation cellular networks will enable cooperation of a broad range of mobile devices, including autonomous or human-controlled devices with varying capabilities to communicate and interact with other devices. Visionary scenarios foresee unmanned vehicles to be organized in networked teams and even swarms. This vision can be applied to a wide range of applications, e.g., autonomous driving including platooning and traffic control, exploration for search-and-rescue missions, and factory automation. The communication subsystem needs to provide highly reliable and delay-tolerant control links as well as data links. Unmanned vehicles also offer the capability to form ad-hoc wireless networks, for example to facilitate temporary hot spots and compensate network outages in case of public events and emergencies. The navigation sub-system musts provide relative positioning information with sub-meter accuracy and very low latency (~1 ms). The steering and control unit needs to be tightly coupled with the communications and navigation subsystem to ensure proper decisions even with imperfect local information. The focus of the workshop will be solely on projects and research aiming at civilian applications. This sixth edition of the workshop aims to cover the most recent results of international research on new communications networks enabling the efficient control and context-awareness of teams of unmanned vehicles/systems operating on the ground, in the air, underwater, and in space scenarios.