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This special issue collects selected articles from the Third International Workshop on Linearity (LINEARITY 2014), which was held in Vienna, on July 13th, 2014. The workshop was a one-day satellite event of FLoC 2014, the sixth Federated Logic Conference, which was held as part of the 2014 Vienna Summer of Logic. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016

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The increasing availability and use of autonomous vehicles for real operational scenarios has led to the need for tools that allow human operators to interact with multiple systems effectively, taking into account their capabilities, limitations and environmental constraints. Multiple vehicles, deployed together in order to accomplish a common goal, impose a high burden on a human operator for specifying and executing coordinated behavior, particularly in mixed-initiative systems where humans are part of the control loop. In this paper, we describe experimental field tests for Dolphin, a domain-specific language that allows a single program to define the joint behaviour of multiple vehicles over a network. Using the language, it is possible to accomplish an orchestrated execution of single-vehicle tasks according to several patterns such as sequential, concurrent, or event-based program flow. With this aim, Dolphin has been integrated modularly with a software toolchain for autonomous vehicles developed by Laboratorio de Sistemas e Tecnologia Subaquatica (LSTS). The tests we describe made use of LSTS unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) at open sea during the 2017 edition of Rapid Environment Picture (REP), an annual exercise jointly organised by LSTS and the Portuguese Navy.

Abstract
We present Dolphin, an extensible programming language for autonomous vehicle networks. A Dolphin program expresses an orchestrated execution of tasks defined compositionally for multiple vehicles. Building upon the base case of elementary one-vehicle tasks, the built-in operators include support for composing tasks in several forms, for instance according to concurrent, sequential, or event-based task flow. The language is implemented as a Groovy DSL, facilitating extension and integration with external software packages, in particular robotic toolkits. The paper describes the Dolphin language, its integration with an open-source toolchain for autonomous vehicles, and results from field tests using unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).