An intelligent or smart robot features a robotic system with an artificial intelligence (AI) engine, thus being able to learn from its surrounding environment and communicate with other robots and/or human partners when performing collaborative tasks. Advanced communication and networking capabilities consequently become the key enabler for building such cooperative, intelligent, networked robot systems. It will be a major step forward beyond the current practice, which typically assumes each individual robot to operate in an isolated manner without coordination among one another. Moreover, enhanced communication and networking functions among robots will pave the way to realize the vision of intelligent swarm, which involves a large number of robots working in concert under unintended usage scenarios.

 

Designing advanced communication and networking capabilities for robots pose new research challenges. They include, but are not limited to, increased complexity for distributed task management, distributed and robust control, latency-sensitive and resilient delivery for mission-critical commands and messages, and in-network processing of massive sensory data streams from robots.

 

In recent years, several AI-based techniques have been applied to address the above challenges and empower networked robots. Popular machine learning paradigms, such as unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, transfer learning, and federated learning, have been explored to improve the learning efficiency of communication and networking subsystems. Empowering robots with domain-specific AI solutions holds great promise on building the upcoming collaborative and intelligent networked robot system. This special issue will focus on the technical challenges in advanced communications and networking for intelligent robots, as well as domain-specific AI solutions to enabling intelligent perception of environment, intelligent networking, and smart processing of big data of intelligent robot systems. We invite original research contributions that facilitate the advance of communications and networking capabilities for intelligent robots.

 

Submission Deadline: February 15, 2021

Acceptance Notification (1st round): April 15, 2021

Minor Revision Due: May 5, 2021

Final Decision Due: June 5, 2021

Final Manuscript Due: July 5, 2021

Publication Date: October 15, 2021

 

Tao Wang, Peking University, China

Lingyang Song, Peking University, China

Kaigui Bian, Peking University, China

Hewu Li, Tsinghua University, China

Songwu Lu, UCLA, USA

 

TOPICS OF INTEREST INCLUDE, BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO, THE FOLLOWING: 

● Infrastructure-free, ad hoc networking for intelligent robots

● Energy scavenging techniques for intelligent robots

● Data-driven optimization for robot interconnection networks

● Testbed and experimental evaluation for communication and networking of intelligent robots

● Systems and applications of aerial, ground, and underwater networked robots

● Applications of machine learning in networking and communications of intelligent robots

● Distributed sensing and high-fidelity map service for robot navigation

● Smart and energy-efficient sensing for intelligent robots

● Swarm intelligence for networked robots

● Robotic Internet-of-Things

● Domain-specific AI to collaborative intelligent robots

 

This feature topic “Advanced Communications and Networking for Intelligent Robots” invites submissions of high-quality original research papers in this dynamic and fast-evolving area. Potential topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the areas listed above.

 

Papers should be submitted in two separate .doc files (preferred) or .pdf files: 1) Main Document (including paper title, abstract, key words, and full text); 2) Title page (including paper title, author affiliation, acknowledgement and any other information related with the authors’ identification) through the Manuscript Central. Please register or login at http://mc03.manuscriptcentral.com/chinacomm, go to the author center and follow the instructions thereafter. Remember to select “Advanced Communications and Networking for Intelligent Robots – October Issue, 2021” as your manuscript type in your submission process; otherwise, it might be treated as a regular submission but not for this special issue.

 

Each submission must be accompanied with the following information:

● an abstract of about 150 words

● 3-8 keywords

● original photographs with high-resolution (300 dpi or greater); eps. or tif. format is preferred

● sequentially numbered references. The basic reference format is: author name, "article name", issue name(italic）, vol, no., page, month, year. For example: Y.M Huang, "pervateture in wireless hetergeneous..",IEEE Journal on Selected Areas, vol.27, no. 5, pp 34-50, May, 2009.

● brief biographies of authors (50-75 words)

● contact information, including email and postal addresses

 
Please note that each submission will typically be approximately 4500 words, with no more than 20 mathematical formulas, accomplished by up to 10 figures and/or tables.