Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Systems for Challenging Environments

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Systems & Control Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2022) | Viewed by 5828

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Electronic Engineering, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK
Interests: robotics and mechatronics; autonomous systems; sensing and control
Department of Design, Manufacturing and Engineering Management, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow G1 1XJ, UK
Interests: robotics and autonomous systems; mechatronics and automation; data analytics; intelligent control; computational intelligence; digital manufacturing
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Guest Editor
School of Aerospace, Transport and Manufacturing, Cranfield University, Cranfield MK43 0AL, UK
Interests: autonomous systems; advanced flight controls; human–autonomy interaction; urban air mobility; explainable AI for trustworthy autonomous systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Challenging environments are generally referred to as environments which are unknown, unstructured, dynamic, cluttered, hazardous, expansive, or resource-constrained (such as lack of GPS and communications and hindered visibility).

The development of robotic and autonomous systems (RAS) for these environments is an ongoing challenge. Many traditional RAS are inadequate because the interactions between the RAS and the environment can be critical for success, complex and difficult to model, or simply unpredictable and constantly changing.

Intelligent robotics and autonomous systems (iRAS) are playing an increasingly important role in challenging and extreme environments that are physically remote, unreachable or dangerous for humans.  As such, iRAS are often deployed in place of humans and must have greater capabilities to fulfil their roles than systems that can work alongside humans. To date, a diverse range of robotic technologies have been developed for challenging environment applications that include agriculture, nuclear maintenance and decommissioning, search and rescue operations, planetary exploration and undersea mapping, monitoring, and intervention.  However, we are still far from an era where robots will possess sufficient levels of intelligence and autonomy to perform tasks fully unsupervised and with human-level skills in these environments.

Noting that many of these technologies are transferable across applications, the motivation behind this Special Issue is to bring together key robotic technologies from differing fields to inspire new ideas for more generalised solutions from existing application-specific technologies. The issue is calling for cutting-edge contributions to fundamental research in the area of iRAS and ground-breaking applications  in industries.

The SI welcomes topics including but not limited to:

  • Space robotics
  • Aerial robotics
  • Underwater robotics
  • Agriculture robotics
  • Medical robotics
  • Nuclear robotics
  • Adaptable and reconfigurable robotics
  • Design and system modelling
  • Intelligent control
  • Intelligent sensing
  • Perception and reasoning
  • Digital twinning
  • Sensor fusion
  • Computation vision
  • Machine learning including deep learning
  • Autonomy and self-management
  • Kinematics and dynamics
  • Motion control and path planning
  • Intelligent navigation

Dr. Mark A. Post
Dr. Erfu Yang
Prof. Dr. Gokhan Inalhan
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • Robotics
  • Autonomous Systems
  • Intelligent Systems
  • Mechatronics
  • Autonomy
  • Smart Sensors
  • Challenging Environments

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

33 pages, 16851 KiB  
Article
Self-Assembly and Self-Repair during Motion with Modular Robots
by Robert H. Peck, Jon Timmis and Andy M. Tyrrell
Electronics 2022, 11(10), 1595; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11101595 - 17 May 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2363
Abstract
Self-reconfigurable modular robots consist of multiple modular elements and have the potential to enable future autonomous systems to adapt themselves to handle unstructured environments, novel tasks, or damage to their constituent elements. This paper considers methods of self-assembly, bringing together robotic modules to [...] Read more.
Self-reconfigurable modular robots consist of multiple modular elements and have the potential to enable future autonomous systems to adapt themselves to handle unstructured environments, novel tasks, or damage to their constituent elements. This paper considers methods of self-assembly, bringing together robotic modules to form larger organism-like structures, and self-repair, removing and replacing faulty modules damaged by internal events or environmental phenomena, which allow group tasks for the multi-robot organism to continue to progress while assembly and repair take place. We show that such “in motion” strategies can successfully assemble and repair a range of structures. Previously developed self-assembly and self-repair strategies have required group tasks to be halted before they could begin. This paper finds that self-assembly and self-repair methods able to operate during group tasks can enable faster completion of the task than previous strategies, and provide reliability benefits in some circumstances. The practicality of these new methods is shown with physical hardware demonstrations. These results show the feasibility of assembling and repairing modular robots whilst other tasks are in progress. Full article
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13 pages, 3329 KiB  
Article
Articulating Resilience: Adaptive Locomotion of Wheeled Tensegrity Robot
by Tianyuan Wang, Mark A. Post and Andy M. Tyrrell
Electronics 2022, 11(4), 666; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11040666 - 21 Feb 2022
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2047
Abstract
Resilience plays an important role in improving robustness for robots in harsh environments such as planetary exploration and unstructured terrains. As a naturally compliant structure, tensegrity presents advantageous flexibility for enhancing resilience in robotic applications according to existing research. However, tensegrity robots to [...] Read more.
Resilience plays an important role in improving robustness for robots in harsh environments such as planetary exploration and unstructured terrains. As a naturally compliant structure, tensegrity presents advantageous flexibility for enhancing resilience in robotic applications according to existing research. However, tensegrity robots to date are normally based on monolithic morphologies and are slow in locomotion. In this paper, we demonstrate how we adopt such flexibility to improve the robustness of wheeled robots by articulating modules with tensegrity mechanisms. The test results reveal the robot is resistant and resilient to external hazards in a fully passive manner owing to the continuous elasticity in the structure network. It possesses a good number of DoFs and can adapt to various terrains easily either with actuation or not. The robot is also capable of crawling locomotion aside from wheeled locomotion to traverse uneven surfaces and provide self-recovery from rollovers. It demonstrates good robustness and mobility at the same time compared with existing tensegrity robots and shows the competitiveness with conventional rigid robots in harsh scenarios. The proposed robot presents the capability of tensegrity robots with resilience, robustness, agility, and mobility without compromise. In a broader perspective, it widens the potential of tensegrity robots in practical applications. Full article
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