Important Dates
Submissions Due: 10 November 2026
Publication: May/June 2027
We invite researchers to contribute to our forthcoming special issue on the future of drone computing. Unmanned aerial systems are rapidly transitioning from manually piloted devices into large-scale, AI-driven fleets operating autonomously across shared airspace. The capabilities, economic opportunities, and societal benefits of AI-powered drones are increasingly evident. However, realizing this future demands fundamental advances in systems research. Core research challenges in computing, networking, security, and AI must be addressed to unlock transformative applications — from wildfire detection and suppression to reliable rural medical supply chains to AI-driven public safety response.
This special issue of IEEE Internet Computing will spotlight advances in the systems and networking foundations required to enable safe, scalable, and intelligent drone operations. We invite submissions that explore simulation infrastructure, fleet coordination, edge computing, next-generation networking, security architectures, AI-driven applications, and practical research methodologies that contribute to the development of robust and deployable drone computing systems.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Digital twin design and bidirectional synchronization for drone systems
- Physics-accurate modeling of aerodynamics, sensor noise, and environmental conditions
- Measuring and reducing the gap between simulated and real-world drone behavior
- Faster-than-real-time simulation for failure prediction and safety validation
- Distributed consensus and coordination protocols for large drone fleets
- Hierarchical fleet management and dynamic task allocation
- Airspace deconfliction at scale across heterogeneous platforms
- Mothership-drone architectures for extended mission duration and docking
- Real-time autonomy frameworks with guaranteed worst-case execution times
- Offloading computation between drones, edge nodes, and cloud infrastructure
- Energy-aware and latency-aware resource management at fleet scale
- Scalable command-and-control links for many-operator, many-drone deployments
- Beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) communication architectures
- Scalable drone identity, entity tagging, and key infrastructure
- Detection and mitigation of GPS spoofing, jamming, and signal injection attacks
- Distributed trust mechanisms that operate without centralized authority
- Privacy-preserving coordination protocols for multi-operator drone fleets
- Benchmarks and prototype systems for AI-driven public safety and emergency first response
- Benchmarks and prototype systems for Autonomous wildfire detection, monitoring, and suppression support
- Benchmarks and prototype systems for novel applications of drone technology, especially with multiple coordinated drones
- Rigorous performance evaluation under adverse weather, communication loss, and dynamic obstacles
- Open datasets, shared simulation environments, and community benchmark tasks
Submission Guidelines
For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, visit the Author’s Information Page. Please submit papers through the IEEE Author Portal, system, and be sure to select the special issue or special section name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the IEEE Author Portal. If requested, abstracts should be sent by email to the guest editors directly.
Contact the Guest Editors at:
