Sensors and Sensing Technologies for Social Robots
A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Sensors and Robotics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2025 | Viewed by 1049
Special Issue Editors
Interests: social robotics; artificial vision; autonomous robots; human-robot interaction; social navigation; pose analysis; gesture recognition
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: social robots; artificial vision; smart environments
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Recent technological advances have made it possible to initiate a progressive deployment of service robots in daily life contexts. These next-generation robots are connected to smart environments and other agents, rely on artificial intelligence-based solutions to interact with people using natural channels and cooperate with humans and other agents to accomplish different tasks.
Robots working in these settings must be aware of their context, not only physical but also social. They need to perceive, understand, and adapt their behavior to this context, with special emphasis on perceiving and predicting people’s activities. New sensors and combinations of sensors are employed to help with achieving these tasks, ranging from multicamera systems to radar-based person recognizers, considering both sensors mounted on the robot and others located in the environment or in other agents. The nature and characteristics of these sensors are also influenced by the application domain in which the robot is deployed, ranging from industrial co-workers to home assistants.
In addition to new sensing approaches, Vision–Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for perception, enabling robots to process and interpret complex visual input.
We invite contributions on novel methods, applications, and developments integrating VLMs, advanced sensing techniques, and AI-based solutions for social robots. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Artificial vision systems;
- Person activity recognition;
- Remote person monitoring sensors;
- Sensors for socially assistive robots;
- Multimodal sensor fusion;
- FPGA- and ASIC-based sensor solutions for social robots.
Prof. Dr. Juan Pedro Bandera
Dr. Suna Bensch
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- social robots
- sensor fusion
- artificial vision
- object detection
- activity recognition
- human–robot interaction
- shared perception
- multiagent cooperation
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