Unmanned Autonomous Systems (UAS), including robots, drones, and underwater vehicles, are becoming more mature and being integrated into several applications to fulfill different critical missions. With the emergence of artificial intelligence, UAS have boosted their performance. They also enabled new kinds of advanced technologies leveraging the power of AI, including smart cities, surveillance, self-driving cars, target detection and tracking, smart agriculture, law enforcement, logistic, and transportation, to name a few.

These applications create new specific technical challenges. Considering the computation-intensive requirements of AI models, their real-time execution of battery-based edge devices, typically used on UAS, poses a significant challenge. Security and privacy are other primary concerns, mainly when UAS are deployed through cloud-based environments. There are several other problems, including low-resolution aerial image processing, zero-shot classification of UAS-collected images, reinforcement learning-based control, and edge-based processing vs. cloud-based computation offloading, to name a few.

This Symposium aims to bring together state-of-the-art contributions that would address several challenges pertaining to leveraging the use of AI with UAS. The Symposium welcomes technical papers, in addition to papers reporting experimental prototypes and studies on the use of AI with UAS.