Robust and Resilient Robots

Dear Colleagues,

Resilience is known to human society but less known to engineering. Resilience is not elasticity nor reliability but it is a property of a system, measuring the ability of a system to recover from a partial damage on its own resource (CIRP Annals, 60:469-472, 2011). The concept of resilient robots has been recently proposed (On the concept of resilient robots, Industrial Electronics and Applications (ICIEA), 2011 6th IEEE Conference on). A resilient robotic system (single robot, group of robots) possesses the property of resilience by its structure along with its control or operation management. A full resilient robot is composed of the following systems: damage monitor, change planner as well as scheduler, and change execution management. Thus, a resilient robot goes beyond a self-reconfiguration system. A resilient system has important applications in the areas where an external assistance to a robot is prohibiting, e.g., rescuer, space exploration, see exploration, implanted devises in human body.

Papers are solicited in the following areas (but not limited): robot fault detection and diagnosis, under-actuated reconfiguration, change/reconfiguration planning, change/reconfiguration scheduling, change/reconfiguration execution and control, docking-undocking, new architecture of robots for improving the resilience.

Prof. Dr. Wenjun (Chris) Zhang
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 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.