Abstract
The International Micro Air Vehicle Conference and Competition (IMAV) is an annual event that gathers scientists and enthusiasts from academia, the industry and government, interested in the research and development of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). After a successful IMAV held in Madrid, Spain in 2019, for the first time ever, the 12th Edition of the IMAV was hosted by Latin American academic institutions from Mexico from November 17–19 of 2021.
Due to the pandemic, the IMAV 2021 was run online as a virtual conference, so unfortunately, no competition could be organised. However, 27 peer-reviewed papers were presented at the conference from which 5 papers were selected to be part of this special issue. Three of these papers were nominated by the local committee and members of the international committee to receive the Best Conference Paper Award. For the other two, one received the Best Technical/Application Paper and the other one the Best Student Paper Award.
The papers compiled in this Special Issue have undergone a further review process, thus producing improved versions of the selected conference papers whose topics range from control and aeroacoustic design to applications with multiple MAVs.
In this issue, the article entitled “Aeroacoustic optimization of MAV rotors” by Pietro Li Volsi et al., uses a nonlinear vortex lattice method, coupled with Farrassat's aeroacoustic tonal noise model to optimise the rotor geometries and find aerodynamically efficient and aeroacoustically stealthy MAV rotors. This work was granted the Best Student Paper Award.
The article entitled “Field report: deployment of a fleet of drones for cloud exploration” by Gautier Hattenberger et al., won the Best Technical/Application Paper Award for their work on the development of a dedicated architecture to operate multiple drones during an international field campaign to study the evolution of clouds with several flights beyond the line of sight.
Before mentioning the winner of the Best Conference Paper Award, the work of two articles in this issue were recognised as finalists to this award. The article entitled “Estimating wind using a quadrotor” by Gautier Hattenberger et al, was one of the finalists for their work on estimation of the wind affecting a quadcopter using only standard navigation sensors and equations of motion.
The other finalist to the Best Conference Paper award was the article entitled “Extended Incremental Non-linear Control Allocation on the TU Delft Quadplane” by Jan Karssies and Christophe de Wagter, nominated for their work on the novel XINCA controller used to control the outer control loop of the TU Delft Quadplane.
The Best Conference Paper was awarded to the article entitled “Nonlinear model predictive control for improving range-based relative localization by maximizing observability” by Shushuai Li et al., which investigates the localisation and control efficacy of MPC for multi-MAV systems with weak observability.
Finally, we are hopeful that this Special Issue serves to contribute to the dissemination of novel and exciting research work and technical developments of micro aerial vehicles presented at the IMAV 2021.
Jose Martinez-Carranza Hugo Rodriguez-Cortes Cesar Martinez-Torres Jose Fermi Guerrero-Castellanos