Control and Path Planning for Autonomous Vehicles

Dear Colleagues,

The convergence of autonomous driving and smart mobility requires groundbreaking innovations in decision-making, control, path planning, and validation frameworks, all while ensuring seamless integration with intelligent transportation ecosystems. As key components of Industry 4.0, autonomous vehicles require embodied intelligence that bridges perception, action, and environmental interaction—a vision aligned with this journal’s focus on intelligent mechanical systems and cyber–physical advancements. This Special Issue seeks to advance the development of certifiable autonomous driving technologies through cutting-edge research in AI-enhanced decision-control architectures, adaptive navigation, and rigorous testing paradigms.

We invite authors to submit original research, reviews, and case studies that synergize theoretical depth with industrial applicability. We are particularly keen to publish dubmissions emphasizing embodied intelligence (e.g., sensorimotor integration for contextual decision-making) or human-centric smart mobility solutions. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following areas and themes:

Test and evaluation:

• Virtual-real fusion validation platforms (digital twin, scenario mining);
• SOTIF/ISO 34502-compliant safety certification;
• Edge case generation for embodied interaction testing.

Decision and control:

• Hierarchical decision-making with multi-modal perception fusion;
• Reinforcement learning-based control under traffic uncertainties;
• Game-theoretic interaction modeling for mixed traffic flows.

Path planning and mobility:

• Risk-bounded trajectory optimization in dynamic environments;
• V2X-enhanced collaborative navigation for smart cities;
• Energy-efficient routing with road-vehicle co-simulation.

Embodied AI integration:

• Cognitive architectures for vehicle-environment symbiosis;
• Physical-world priors in decision-planning pipelines;
• Adversarial robustness testing for sensor-actuator loops.

Contributions should demonstrate reproducible methodologies validated through simulations, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) platforms, or real-world deployments. Interdisciplinary studies bridging robotics, transportation engineering, and intelligent mechatronic systems are welcome, reflecting our commitment to advancing industrial-ready intelligent machinery.

Join us in shaping the future of autonomous driving as a cornerstone of smart, safe, and sustainable mobility.

Dr. Chuan Sun
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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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. Machines 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 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.

• path planning
• mobility
• autonomous driving