AI-Powered IoT Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are converging to create intelligent, adaptive, and data-driven systems for sensing, communication, decision-making, and automation. Modern IoT systems are evolving from passive data collection networks into AI-powered infrastructures capable of real-time perception, distributed learning, context-aware control, and autonomous operation. This transformation is supported by advances in wireless sensing, edge and fog computing, embedded intelligence, and next-generation communication technologies.

AI-powered IoT systems are now being applied across the energy, industrial, healthcare, transportation, and environmental domains. In these environments, precise object detection, robust time-series analytics, seamless human–robot collaboration, resilient industrial IoT architectures, and scalable large model deployment have become essential capabilities. However, several challenges remain unresolved: IoT devices often operate under limited energy, bandwidth, storage, and computing resources; sensor data may be noisy, incomplete, heterogeneous, temporally correlated, or privacy-sensitive; and AI models must be lightweight, robust, explainable, secure, and deployable across distributed edge–cloud environments.

This Special Issue aims to provide a forum for recent advances in AI-Powered IoT Systems, with particular emphasis on object detection, robotics, industrial IoT, time-series analysis, and large model applications. The topic aligns with the scope of Future Internet, an international, peer-reviewed open access journal concerned with the evolution of Internet technologies and related smart systems, which encompasses IoT applications and infrastructure, cloud computing, cybersecurity, networking protocols, emerging Internet-based technologies, digital twins, object detection, robotics, industrial IoT, time-series analysis, foundation models, edge AI, multimodal sensor fusion, TinyML, security and privacy, low-altitude economy, and UAVs.

Original research articles, review articles, and short communications are welcome. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

- AI-powered IoT architectures, digital twins, and intelligent connected systems;

- Object detection, visual tracking, and scene understanding for resource-constrained IoT perception;

- Robotics, autonomous navigation, motion planning, and intelligent control in IoT environments;

- Industrial IoT, predictive maintenance, smart manufacturing, and Industry 4.0 automation;

- Time-series analysis, forecasting, anomaly detection, and temporal data mining for IoT streams;

- Large models, foundation models, multimodal large language models, and generative AI for IoT perception, reasoning, and control;

- Edge AI, model compression, federated learning, and distributed intelligence at the network edge;

- Real-time signal processing, multimodal sensor fusion, and perception with radar, LiDAR, and photonic sensing;

- Lightweight, energy-efficient, and resource-aware AI models for embedded IoT devices;

- Security, privacy, trustworthiness, and explainability in AI-enabled IoT ecosystems;

- Low-altitude economy, UAV swarms, aerial–ground coordination, and intelligent drone systems for urban air mobility, logistics, and surveillance.

Prof. Dr. Shaolin Allen Liao
Prof. Dr. Shufeng Li
Prof. Dr. Fan Zhou
Guest Editors

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-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Future Internet is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly 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 1800 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.