Active Methods in Autonomous Navigation

Dear Colleagues,

The goal of this Special Issue on “Active methods in autonomous navigation” is to bring together researchers, industry professionals, and enthusiasts across different sectors related to navigation, such as driverless car technology, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), humanoid locomotion, rover navigation, social navigation, and SLAM—including re-localization and loop-closure detection, swarm navigation, and semantic mapping, coupling their functionality with perception and action recognition. Moreover, we also encourage size, weight, area, and power (SWAP)—aware navigation methods and bio-inspired approaches for mobile-robot autonomy. Our discussion will range from previously experienced problems to contemporary solutions and future trends, focusing on purposive perception planning since it remains an open problem in the community.

Call for Papers

We invite the submission of papers related to autonomous navigation based on active perception or action and perception-coupled methods. Topics of interest for this workshop and the associated Special Issue include (but are not limited to) papers describing active solutions in a series of areas:

• Autonomous navigation;
• Perception–action coupling;
• Driverless cars;
• Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs);
• Size, weight, area and power (SWAP)-aware design;
• Bio-inspired navigation;
• Planetary exploration;
• Swarm behavior;
• Social navigation;
• Semantic mapping and navigation;
• Visual place recognition;
• Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM);
• Visual odometry;
• Hyper-dimensional computing for perception;
• Human action recognition;
• Space robotics.

Dr. Konstantinos Tsintotas
Dr. Loukas Bampis
Dr. Nitin J Sanket
Prof. Dr. Antonios Gasteratos
Prof. Dr. Giulio Sandini
Prof. Dr. Yiannis Aloimonos
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-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Robotics 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.