Distributed Control and Estimation of Robotic Vehicle Networks: Overview of the Special Issue

Many applications, such as environmental monitoring, security and surveillance, scientific exploration, and intelligent transportation, share a fundamental need to accomplish multiple tasks across space and time that are beyond the capabilities of a single autonomous platform. The growing demand for autonomous multivehicle networks has stimulated a broad interest in distributed control and estimation (DCE) strategies that support cooperative and coordinated vehicle autonomy. Ideally, distributed approaches would not only perform as well as centralized methods but also lead to better scalability, naturally parallelized computation, and resilience to communication loss and hardware failures.