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Future Mobility: Latest Advances in Automatic Driving

A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Transportation and Future Mobility".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 August 2026 | Viewed by 190

Special Issue Editor


E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China
Interests: reasoning; planning; navigation; reinforcement learning

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Recent breakthroughs in multimodal sensing, perception and planning networks, generative world models, and foundation-scale end-to-end netoworks are rapidly propelling the field toward safe, scalable autonomatic driving. This transformation brings fresh scientific and engineering challenges—from robust perception in long-tail conditions to human–machine cooperation, and from large-scale validation to sustainable deployment. To foster progress, this Special Issue offers a forum for new concepts, solid experimental results, and visionary perspectives spanning the complete automated-driving ecosystem.

Areas relevant to future automatic driving include, but are not limited to, advances in perception, prediction, planning, control, safety engineering, data-centric AI, and the socio-technical context in which automated vehicles will operate.

This Special Issue will publish high-quality, original research papers in the following overlapping fields:

  • Pushing the perception frontier—BEV/OCC networks, multi-modal fusion, long-tail robustness.
  • Advancing data-centric learning—end-to-end pipelines, Vision–Language–Action (VLA) driving models, generative world models, self-supervised and reinforcement learning.
  • Innovating in prediction, planning, and control—deep planning networks, uncertainty-aware decision making, behavior generation under adversarial or rare scenarios.
  • Leveraging connectivity and cooperation—V2X cooperative perception, swarm intelligence, edge/cloud co-computing.
  • Guaranteeing safety and compliance—scenario-based and formal verification, functional safety and SOTIF methodologies, regulation (UNECE R157, ISO 26262).

Dr. Jianmin Ji
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • autonomous driving
  • sensor fusion
  • BEV/OCC networks
  • planning networks
  • end-to-end networks
  • world models
  • VLA models
  • scenario generation
  • safety validation

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