Advances in Embodied Intelligence for Robotics

Dear Colleagues,

Embodied intelligence is emerging as a central paradigm in robotics, aiming to develop autonomous systems that can perceive their surroundings, understand complex physical environments, make reliable decisions, and interact effectively with the real world. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, multimodal sensing, foundation models, reinforcement learning, and simulation technologies have created new opportunities for building robotic systems with enhanced autonomy, adaptability, and generalization capabilities.

This Special Issue, entitled “Advances in Embodied Intelligence for Robotics,” aims to present recent theoretical, methodological, and application-oriented developments in intelligent robotic systems. It seeks to bring together researchers working across different robotic platforms and application domains, including autonomous vehicles, robotic manipulators, mobile manipulation systems, unmanned aerial and ground vehicles, service robots, industrial robots, and multi-robot systems.

Particular attention will be given to methods that integrate perception, reasoning, prediction, planning, and control within a unified embodied intelligence framework. Relevant topics include multimodal perception, vision–language–action models, robotic foundation models, world models, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, motion planning, dexterous manipulation, autonomous navigation, human–robot interaction, and multi-agent coordination. Research on autonomous vehicles is especially welcome, including behavior prediction, decision-making, motion planning, end-to-end driving, cooperative driving, and safety evaluation. Contributions related to robotic manipulation may address grasping, object rearrangement, task planning, mobile manipulation, and learning-based control in complex environments.

The Special Issue also encourages studies addressing the transition from simulation to real-world deployment. Topics such as sim-to-real transfer, digital twins, synthetic data generation, embodied simulation, uncertainty estimation, robustness, interpretability, and trustworthy robotic systems are of particular interest. These research directions are essential for ensuring that embodied agents can operate safely and reliably under distribution shifts, environmental uncertainty, and dynamic interactions with humans and other agents.

Although significant progress has been achieved in individual areas of robotics, research remains fragmented across platforms and tasks. This Special Issue aims to provide a unified forum for sharing transferable methodologies, practical insights, and emerging perspectives on embodied intelligence. We welcome original research articles, review papers, and application-oriented studies involving realistic simulations, physical robotic platforms, or field deployment.

In this context, for this Special Issue on “Advances in Embodied Intelligence for Robotics”, we invite original research and comprehensive reviews on topics that include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Embodied intelligence for robotics;
• Foundation models and vision–language–action models for robots;
• Robot learning and adaptive control;
• Autonomous vehicles and mobile robotics;
• Robotic manipulation and grasping;
• Mobile manipulation systems;
• Human–robot interaction and collaboration;
• Multi-robot coordination and swarm robotics;
• Sim-to-real transfer and embodied simulation;
• Safety, robustness, and trustworthy robotics;
• Applications in transportation, manufacturing, logistics, education, and service.

Dr. Ke Guo
Dr. Zeqing Zhang
Dr. Yajue Yang
Dr. Jiaming Qi
Dr. Peng Zhou
Guest Editors

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