The 2016 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, ICUAS'16, will be held for the first time in the Nation's Capital, in the Washington area, on June 7-10. The conference venue is the Key Bridge Marriott, located just across the Key Bridge from Washington D.C. and Georgetown, and two blocks from the Rosslyn Metro Station, on the Orange and Blue Line trains. June 7 will be a Workshop/Tutorial day, followed by a three-day technical Conference on June 8-10.

Judging from the interest ICUAS has drawn over the past eight years and its growth, ICUAS'16 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 rapidly evolving and expanding field.

ICUAS'16 is fully sponsored by the ICUAS Association, a non-profit organization; Information about the organization may be found at www.icuas.com. The theme of ICUAS'16 will focus on the very challenging and timely topic of designing high-confidence autonomous unmanned systems. National and international organizations, agencies, industry, military and civilian authorities are working towards defining roadmaps of UAS 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 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 with manned aviation and into the respective national airspace.

ICUAS'16 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 UAS advances, and the roadmap to their full utilization in civilian and public domains. Special emphasis will be given to current and future research opportunities, and to 'what comes next' in terms of the essential technologies that need to be utilized to advance further UAS.