The 2019 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, ICUAS'19, will be held on June 11-14, in the Atlanta Marriott Buckhead Hotel and Conference Center which is situated in a supreme location in the heart of Atlanta. June 11 will be a Workshop/Tutorial full-day, followed by a three-day technical Conference on June 12-14.

Judging from the interest ICUAS has drawn over the past years and its growth, ICUAS'19 is expected to continue on this path and attract the highest number of participants from academia, industry, federal and state agencies, government, the private sector, users, practitioners and engineers who wish to be affiliated with and contribute technically to this highly demanding and evolving and expanding field. ICUAS'19 is fully sponsored by the ICUAS Association, which is a non-profit organization. Information about the Association may be found at www.icuas.com.

The major themes of ICUAS'19 will be: design for trusted and assured autonomy, metrics for autonomy, and design for resilience. These focus area topics are center-stage in the attempt to design and build high-confidence UAS/RPAS. In addition, ICUAS'19 will include a separate track on regulations, policy, legal and ethical issues that are essential to allow for integration of UAS/RPAS in the national airspace. National and international organizations, agencies, industry, military and civilian authorities are working towards defining roadmaps of UAS/RPAS expectations, technical requirements and standards that are prerequisite to their full utilization, as well as legal, policy and ethical issues. The next generation of UAS/RPAS is expected to be used for a wide spectrum of civilian and public domain applications. Challenges to be faced and overcome include, among others, see-and-avoid systems, robust and fault-tolerant flight control systems, payloads, communications, levels of autonomy, manned-unmanned swarms, network-controlled swarms, as well as challenges related to policies, procedures, regulations, safety, risk analysis assessment, airworthiness, certification issues, operational constraints, standardization and frequency management, all of paramount importance, which, coupled with 'smart', 'environmentally friendly' cutting edge technologies will pave the way towards full integration of UAS/RPAS with manned aviation and into the respective national airspace.

ICUAS'19 aims at bringing together different groups of qualified military and civilian representatives worldwide, organization representatives, funding agencies, industry and academia, to discuss the current state of unmanned aviation advances, and the roadmap to their full utilization in civilian and public domains. Special emphasis will be given to research opportunities, and to 'what comes next' in terms of the essential technologies that need to be utilized to advance the state-of-the-art.

Unmanned system collaboration/coordination, formation control, validation/verification and unmanned system design for trusted autonomy, are topics of great interest to ICUAS'19. Through Keynote addresses, round table discussions and presentations, it is expected that the outcome of the Conference will be a clear understanding of what industry, military, civilian, national/international authorities need, and what are the crucial next steps that need to be completed before UAS/RPAS are utilized in everyday life applications.