In recent years, multi-vehicle systems have been extensively investigated and applied.  Distributed theory plays a principal role in coordinating large-scale multi-vehicle systems, which has been featured in cooperative sensing, control, planning, guidance, and other swarm mechanisms. How to coordinate numerous autonomous vehicles to exhibit certain complicated swarm behaviors depends on exquisite distributed theory in sensing, control, planning, and guidance. Besides, distributed techniques require information interaction of neighboring vehicle via network communications. This means that outstanding swarm behaviors depend on perfect interactive protocols. Moreover, a majority of autonomous vehicles, such as UAVs, USVs, and UGVs, are characterized by nonlinear, non-holonomic, and under-actuated attributes. This imposes additional difficulty in their coordination subject to the complexity of internal models. Moreover, autonomous vehicles frequently operate in strange unstructured circumstances. Confronted with environmental disturbances, it becomes difficult to maintain benign cooperative performance. This motivates the introduction of feasible anti-disturbance mechanisms into distributed techniques. 

In this Topic Collection, we invite you to contribute original research articles, brief reports, systematic reviews, systemic and shorter perspectives, opinions, and expert perspectives on all aspects related to the theme of “distributed theory and applications to autonomous vehicles”. Relevant topics include but are not limited to:

• Distributed control of autonomous vehicles
• Distributed path/trajectory planning of autonomous vehicles
• Distributed guidance of autonomous vehicles
• Formation control of UAVs/UGVs/USVs
• Methodologies for distributed theory 
• Distributed sensing
• Resilient distributed control
• Robust/Adaptive distributed control 
• Distributed filter
• Distributed optimization
• Collective intelligence
• Self-organization
• Multi-vehicle systems
• Multi-vehicle applications