Intelligent Sensing, Conversational Intelligence and Robot Control for Human–Machine Coexistence
A Special Issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220) belonging to the section "Sensors and Robotics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 December 2026 | Viewed by 549
Editor
Interests: wearable robots; human-centered systems; human-computer interfaces; brain-machine interfaces; bio-signal engineering
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
As society moves toward seamless coexistence between humans and autonomous agents, the ability of machines to perceive and respond to both verbal and non-verbal human intent is becoming a central challenge in next-generation robotics and sensing research.
A defining feature of this challenge is the need to integrate two fundamentally contrasting visual paradigms: third-person visual sensing—enabling precise sign and gesture recognition from an external observer's perspective; and ego-centric (first-person) perception—enabling robots to infer human intent and understand environmental context from their own viewpoint. This duality reflects a core demand placed on symbiotic robotic systems: to simultaneously observe the human and inhabit the human world.
Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have greatly advanced conversational AI; however, a critical gap remains in grounding this high-level linguistic intelligence into reliable, real-time physical robot motion. True human–machine symbiosis, therefore, demands tightly integrated systems that bridge "understanding"—encompassing multimodal sensing and AI reasoning—and "acting"—encompassing compliant, vision-informed motor control—into a unified, embodied architecture.
For this Special Issue, we invite the contribution of original research articles and reviews that advance the frontier of intelligent, symbiotic human–robot systems across sensing, reasoning, and actuation. We welcome contributions that address these challenges from both fundamental and applied perspectives.
- Multimodal Conversational AI: Grounding LLMs with visual, tactile, and contextual sensing for natural human–robot dialogue.
- Vision-based Interaction: Third-person sign language and gesture recognition; ego-centric video analysis for intent estimation and context awareness.
- Human–Robot Symbiosis: Motion analysis, social relationship modeling, and proactive response in human-centric environments.
- Advanced Robot Control: Bio-inspired motor control, compliant actuation, and real-time vision-informed control loops.
- Social and Clinical Applications: Conversational robots in healthcare, elderly care, psychiatry, and associated ELSI considerations.
- System Integration: Hardware–software co-design and real-time architectures for embodied symbiotic interaction.
Prof. Dr. Duk Shin
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- conversational AI
- large language models
- ego-centric vision
- sign gesture recognition
- human–robot interaction
- robot motor control
- human–machine coexistence
- multimodal sensing
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