Sustainable AI and Robotics: Engineering Foundations for Long-Term Societal Impact

Dear Colleagues,

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics are increasingly becoming foundational infrastructure technologies that shape decision-making, coordination, and interaction across society. As these systems permeate everyday life, sustainability demands a shift from short-term evaluations of technical performance toward long-term assessments of risks and benefits. In particular, it requires assessing whether AI and robotic systems can remain beneficial, trustworthy, and maintainable over time without fostering technological obsolescence, externalized environmental or social costs, or fragile deployment cycles.

In this Special Issue, we frame sustainability in AI and robotics as a multi-dimensional, socio-technical life-cycle property of these technologies. From this perspective, a sustainable AI or robotic system is one whose design and engineering preserve, over time, core human, social, and ecological dimensions of sustainability. This includes maintaining human agency and oversight, supporting human cognitive, physical, and social capabilities, fostering trust and legitimacy through transparency and accountability, enabling continuity of practices without constant technological reinvention, and minimizing environmental impacts across the system lifecycle. Achieving these goals requires systems that are understandable, auditable, maintainable, and adaptable not only in deployment, but also within research and development practices so that technologies can support cumulative scientific progress rather than short-lived innovation cycles.

The aim of this Special Issue is to advance Sustainable AI and Robotics as a rigorous interdisciplinary research area that explicitly connects engineering foundations including software, hardware, and system design with measurable sustainability outcomes across environmental, social, and economic dimensions. Building on a socio-technical, life-cycle perspective, the Special Issue seeks contributions that translate sustainability principles into concrete engineering practices, evaluation criteria, and reusable methodologies applicable both in real-world deployment and in research contexts.

This focus aligns directly with Sustainability by linking environmental sustainability (e.g., energy consumption, materials, electronic waste, and life-cycle impacts), social sustainability (e.g., dignity, autonomy, fairness, accountability, and trust), and economic sustainability (e.g., cost of ownership, maintainability, resilience, and accessibility) to the engineering reality of AI and robotic systems. A core premise of this Special Issue is that these dimensions are downstream consequences of engineering sustainability—the methods and practices that make systems repairable, updateable, testable, governable at scale, and transparent with respect to their societal and environmental impacts.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Conceptual Foundations and Definitions of Sustainable AI and Robotics
• Software Engineering Practices for Long-Term Sustainability, Reproducibility, and Lifecycle Management
• Open-Source Software and Open Hardware as Enablers of Sustainable Research and Deployment
• Long-Term Human–Robot Interaction: Trust, Ethics, and Human Factors
• Developmental and Cognitive-Inspired Models for Sustainable Lifelong Learning
• Multimodal and Embodied Interfaces for Sustainable Interaction and Learning
• Sustainable AI and Robotics in Education: Inclusive and Child-Centered Approaches
• Sustainable AI and Robotics in Work and Healthcare Domains
• Metrics, Indicators, and Evaluation Frameworks for Measuring Sustainability in AI and Robotics

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Davide De Tommaso
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. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 2400 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.

• sustainable AI
• robotics
• human-centered AI
• human–robot interaction
• software architectures
• lifecycle engineering