It is a great privilege to bring to you two special issues in Volume 56, covering the state-of-the art research in the area of Autonomous Vehicles. The increased interest in this area during the past decade has led to the development of several unmanned systems for applications from surveillance to space exploration to environmental monitoring. The two issues highlight the recent developments in this exciting area and the challenges to the realization of high-confidence unmanned systems for realworld operations. The coordination and planning of autonomous vehicles are presented in Issue 1. Zou and Pagilla demonstrate the control of multiple mobile robots using distributed constraint force. Moore and Passino develop a rigorous algorithm to enable a group of autonomous vehicles to effectively patrol an environment significantly larger than their communication and sensing radii. Derenick, Spletzer, and Hsieh provide an optimal approach to guaranteed performance during collaborative target tracking. Path planning using Information Roadmaps is presented by Zhang, Ferrari, and Qian. Schuresko and Cortes explore the motion constraints for algebraic connectivity in mobile robot teams. The control of autonomous vehicles is addressed in Issue 2. Adaptive backstepping approach to handle nonlinear aspects of the aircraft dynamics (Das, Lewis, and Subbarao), neural networks based control of robot formations (Dierks and Jagannathan), and control of systems with rigidly mounted sensors (Kim, Zhang,