ACM/IEEE SEC 2026

DroneSys 2026: The 2nd Workshop on Autonomous Drone Computing Systems and Applications

The workshop will be co-located with ACM/IEEE SEC 2026 in Santa Clara, CA, USA. It is planned as a half-day workshop.

Call for Papers

Autonomous drone systems are evolving rapidly from remotely operated platforms into intelligent mobile systems that rely on onboard AI, edge-assisted perception, collaborative autonomy, and real-time decision making. These advances surface distinctive systems challenges involving latency, reliability, energy, safety, communication, and deployment at scale, challenges that lie squarely at the heart of the SEC community's interests in edge computing, systems support for AI, and cyber-physical applications.

DroneSys 2026 provides a focused community forum on systems, platforms, and applications for autonomous drone computing. The workshop emphasizes computation-centric perspectives on drone autonomy: how to design drone systems that are efficient, reliable, safe, secure, and deployable in real-world environments. We invite original research papers and position papers from researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of edge computing, embedded and mobile systems, robotics, networking, cyber-physical systems, and applied AI.

Topics of Interest

Edge-augmented drone autonomy and distributed intelligence
Real-time sensor fusion and perception on resource-constrained platforms
Onboard AI, efficient inference, and resource-aware autonomy
Real-time perception, planning, and control
Swarm intelligence, multi-drone coordination, and drone-to-drone networking
AI offloading, task migration, and energy-efficient onboard AI
Offloading, networking, and air-ground-edge-cloud collaboration
Safety, security, privacy, and trust in drone systems
Benchmarks, testbeds, simulators, and real-world deployments
Applications in public safety, agriculture, logistics, inspection, AR/VR-enhanced operations, and disaster response
Human factors, policy, and regulation-aware drone systems

Submission Guidelines

Only electronic submissions in PDF will be accepted.
Submitted papers must be written in English and rendered without error using standard PDF viewing tools.
Papers must be no longer than 6 single-spaced 8.5" x 11" pages, including figures and tables but excluding references, using 10-point type on 12-point leading, two-column format, Times Roman or similar font, within a text block 7.14" wide x 9.22" deep.
Pages must be numbered, and figures and tables must be legible in black and white.
Papers not meeting these criteria will be rejected without review.
At least one author for each accepted paper must register for the workshop.
Submissions should present original, unpublished work and must not be under review elsewhere.
All submissions will undergo peer review.
Accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings.
IEEE templates: https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html
Submission website: TBD

Important Dates

Submission deadline: June 25, 2026

Acceptance notification: August 15, 2026

Camera-ready deadline: August 22, 2026

Workshop date: October 16, 2026

Workshop Organizers

Liangkai Liu, University of Michigan, USA

Weisong Shi, University of Delaware, USA

TPC Chair

Christopher Stewart, The Ohio State University, USA

Program Committee (Tentative)

Jayson Boubin, SUNY Binghamton

Karthik Dantu, University at Buffalo

Ting Zhu, Ohio State University

Antonio Loquercio, University of Pennsylvania

Guoquan (Paul) Huang, University of Delaware

Jingao Xu, Carnegie Mellon University

Mengyu Liu, Washington State University

Qingzhao Zhang, University of Arizona

Shareef Ahmed, University of South Florida