Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)

- Trajectory Regulation: The specific control strategies required to constrain a vehicle within some tolerance to a trajectory
- Task Allocation and Scheduling: Determining the optimal distribution of tasks amongst a group of agents, with time and equipment constraints
- Cooperative Tactics: Formulating an optimal sequence and spatial distribution of activities between agents in order to maximize chance of success in any given mission scenario
Autonomy is commonly defined as the ability to make decisions without human intervention. To that end, the goal of autonomy is to teach machines to be "smart" and act more like humans. The keen observer may associate this with the development in the field of artificial intelligence made popular in the 1980s and 1990s such as expert systems, neural networks, machine learning, natural language processing, and vision. However, the mode of technological development in the field of autonomy has mostly followed a bottom-up approach, such as hierarchical control systems, and recent advances have been largely driven by the practitioners in the field of control science, not computer science. Similarly, autonomy has been and probably will continue to be considered an extension of the controls field.