Emerging Robots and Sensing Technologies in Geosciences

Dear Colleagues,

We are proud to announce this Special Issue addressing the state-of-the-art of robotic systems and related sensors technologies applied to geosciences.

Sustainable agriculture and environment conservation are top priorities for all governments and nations worldwide. Our population is growing fast, and our resources are becoming ever scarcer. Sensor technology will play a key role in providing fast solutions and recovery plans for these challenges. However, data acquisition is still a challenge, mainly when dealing with complex and dynamic environments such as agricultural fields and natural ecosystems. Gathering reliable data in situ, in a fast, cost-effective, and long-lasting manner is often not possible in many contexts without using robotic platforms endowed with different sensors.

This Special Isue will consider for publication all new advances in autonomous remote sensing systems that are developed to sense closely the earth. We want to give room to ideas that are beyond your imagination, that are unconventional, but at the same time bring scientific soundness.

Topics within the domain of this Special Issue include but are not limited to the following:

• Air, ground, and maritime robotic systems;
• Novel perception systems, event-triggered sensing;
• Sensors (of all kinds) and (data-driven) sensor fusion;
• Open-source software/hardware and mechatronics;
• Informative path planning and adaptive sampling;
• Internet of Things;
• Augmented reality/virtual reality applications;
• Big data and machine learning;
• Open-issues and challenges;
• Precision agriculture, nature conservation, and land degradation assessment;
• Applications and case studies are very welcome!

Note: priority will be given to open-source tools and methods (e.g., software, datasets, and ros{bags, nodes}[1]) that are released upon the acceptance of the publication.

[1]  http://www.ros.org

Dr. João Valente
Dr. Duarte Antunes
Dr. Rolf Hut
Dr. Beril Sirmaçek
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 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.