Journal Joint Special Issue on Design and Control of Responsive Robots

The ASME Journal of Computational and Nonlinear Dynamics and ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics are currently accepting manuscripts for a joint special issue focusing on the topic “Design and Control of Responsive Robots.” Authors interested in having their manuscripts included in the joint special issue, to be published in December 2022, should submit their manuscripts by April 30, 2022.
 
Robots are complex, controlled, dynamical systems that interact with their environments. Novel robot concepts were developed in recent years, such as cable-driven platforms, agile parallel manipulators, lightweight robots, and inherently compliant manipulators, with applications ranging from medical devices, cobots and exoskeletons to machine tools, autonomous platforms for inspection and maintenance, and space robots. Future robots need to be responsive; they must (inter)act safely, minimize the use of resources (energy, material, process-, development-, and commissioning-time), and adapt to variations in demands and environmental conditions. The key to a reliable design of such robotic systems is holistic design approaches embracing kinematic synthesis, dynamic analysis, control, sensory perception, and adaptability.
 
The mechanical embodiment, as the starting point of any robot design, must be designed together with control, actuation, and sensory components. Novel mechanical design principles combining high-fidelity kinematic and dynamic models with data-driven methods are applied along with model-free machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) methods. The foundation is a synergetic combination of research in mechanism theory and dynamical systems and control.
 
This joint special issue (published over two volumes, one in each sponsoring journal) aims to bridge these research fields and bring together the latest research on robot kinematics and dynamics as well as intelligent control and data-driven methods for perception, planning, model identification and control.
 
Manuscripts to be included in the special issue should concentrate on a range of topics including, but not limited to, holistic approaches to design, analysis, and control of mechanisms and robots; physical human-robot interaction (pHRI); industrial robots, Cable-driven robots and platforms; legged and humanoid robots; robots equipped with series-elastic actuators (SEA); intrinsic and extrinsic sensors for compliant robots; soft and continuum robots; embodied and mechanical intelligence; model-based and robust control; and physics-based AI, data-driven and combined approaches to robot dynamics and control.
 
Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to the journals by April 30, 2022, via Journals Connect at journaltool.asme.org. Authors who have an account should log in as an author and select “Submit Paper” at the bottom of the page. Authors without an account should select “Submissions” and follow the steps. At the Paper Submittal page, authors should select either “ASME Journal of Computational and Nonlinear Dynamics,” or the “ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics” and then select the joint special issue “Design and Control of Responsive Robots.” Please note that to balance the joint special issue between the journals, the Editors-in-Chief may recommend that a paper be transferred from one journal to the other. Final decisions about any transfer will be made in consultation with the Corresponding Author.
 
Papers received after the deadline or papers not selected for inclusion in the joint special issue may be accepted for publication in a regular issue.
 
The guest editors for the joint special issue are Andreas Müller, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, a.mueller@jku.at; Jozsef Kovecses, McGill University, Canada, jozsef.kovecses@mcgill.ca; Charles Kim, Bucknell University, USA, charles.kim@bucknell.edu; Chandramouli Padmanabhan, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India, mouli@iitm.ac.in; and Gabor Orosz, University of Michigan, USA, orosz@umich.edu.
 
For more information on the ASME Journal of Computational and Nonlinear Dynamics, visit https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/computationalnonlinear. For more information on the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics, visit https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/mechanismsrobotics. To learn more about the ASME Journal Program, visit www.asme.org/publications-submissions/journals/information-for-authors.