Advanced Control and Mechatronics for Automotive Systems (AUTOTRONICS)

Dear Colleagues,

Over the past twenty years, the automotive sector has undergone rapid and significant change. What was once a predominantly mechanical discipline has gradually evolved through the integration of control engineering, electronics, and embedded software. As a result, modern vehicles now demonstrate levels of intelligence, autonomy, and connectivity that have fundamentally altered the way they are designed, operated, and understood.

This transformation has been driven by the growing convergence of mechanical subsystems with sensing, computation, and communication technologies. Vehicles are no longer isolated mechanical products; instead, they operate within a wider connected environment, exchanging data with infrastructure, other vehicles, and cloud-based services through vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication. While this connectivity brings clear benefits in terms of functionality, efficiency, and safety, it also introduces additional layers of complexity, placing considerable demands on control and mechatronic system design.

The four widely recognised pillars of contemporary automotive development including autonomy, connectivity, electrification, and shared mobility are all strongly underpinned by advances in control and mechatronics. This reliance is particularly evident in the ongoing shift towards software-intensive and software-defined vehicle architectures, which has led to vehicles increasingly being described as “computers on wheels”. Within such architectures, control systems are no longer organised as strictly hierarchical, upper–lower level structures operating in isolation across different layers. Instead, they are tightly integrated, often executed on shared computing platforms, and play a central role in determining overall vehicle performance, robustness, and reliability.

In this context, controller design has become a critical enabling technology. Modern automotive applications demand a broad range of control approaches, spanning classical and robust techniques, as well as adaptive, learning-based, and data-driven methods. Controllers are increasingly required to operate across multiple domains including powertrain, chassis, energy management, and driver assistance while addressing strong coupling between subsystems, uncertainty, and real-time implementation constraints.

Equally important is the mechatronic framework within which these controllers are developed and deployed. Issues such as integrated control architectures, hardware–software co-design, real-time implementation, compliance with automotive standards, and validation within established development processes, including the V-model, play a decisive role in successful system realisation. Bridging the gap between modelling, control design, and experimental validation therefore remains a persistent challenge for both academic research and industrial practice.

This Special Issue on Advanced Control and Mechatronics for Automotive Systems aims to bring together recent advances in modelling, control, estimation, and mechatronic system design for automotive applications. Contributions addressing electrified powertrains including electric propulsion and battery management systems, autonomous driving functions, vehicle dynamics and motion control, integrated multi-domain control solutions, and experimental or real-time validation are particularly encouraged. The objective is to provide a focused forum for sharing practical insights and high-quality research that will help shape the next generation of automotive control and mechatronic systems and further establish the emerging concept of automotive mechatronics (Autotronics) within the automotive engineering community.

Dr. Kamyar Nikzadfar
Dr. James Pickering
Dr. Saikat Dutta
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• automotive control
• control engineering
• mechatronics
• electric vehicles
• autonomous vehicles
• automotive mechatronics
• autotronics
• software defined vehicles