In today’s world, the demand for autonomous and unmanned aerial vehicles
is rapidly growing with applications in many domains. These autonomous vehicles
have potential advantages like – a reduction in traffic deaths by 90%, a drop in harmful
emissions by 60%, an improvement in fuel economy by 10%, an increase in lane
capacity by 500%, a reduction in travel time by 40%, an increase in transportation
accessibility and a reduction in transportation costs. Similarly, UAVs have advantages
like- traffic monitoring, moving objects in seemingly dangerous environments, payload
delivery and surveillance. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are combinations of
networking, computation and physical systems. The three interacting components of
CPS - communication, computation, control and their coupling effects are necessary for
improving the performance of the UAV network. Control mechanisms, performance
and safety of autonomous and unmanned aerial vehicles are the important factors to be
considered while designing them.The major concern for any fully or partially
autonomous system is safety, the other challenges faced are: mechanical failure,
communication bandwidth shortage, cyber-hacking, communication delay, etc. Various
designs are proposed and tested to overcome these challenges, few of them are: a
framework for software - ReMinds in addition to the extensions implemented in the
Dronology system; for Dronology, researchers have proposed and designed incubators
for safety-critical CPS. The chapter emphasizes the role of CPS in autonomous and
unmanned aerial vehicles, framework of CPS for UAVs, the challenges with respect to
CPS and is concluded with the state of art of the present autonomous vehicles.
Keywords: Autonomous vehicles, Computation, Component based design, Controller area network, Cyber physical system (CPS), Cyber security, Datadriven strategy, Dronology, Embedded systems, Model based design, Networking, Physical Processes, ReMinds, Safety, Sustainability, Transportation, UAVs.