Sensing for Social Robots

Dear colleagues,

Social robots are getting ubiquitous, posing growing pressure on the robotics community to deliver these artificial entities able to play interesting roles in society. Robot skills are, slowly but surely, approaching humans’, i.e., to mimic and further extend humans’ typical skills. Hence, in addition to sensing matching human senses, there is a drive to develop novel sensors and processing techniques for the data produced.

The challenges for the sensors community are huge, ranging from materials to operation principles, mathematical models, sensor fusion, perception, and artificial intelligence, as well as hardware and software aspects. The need to estimate both concepts related to social sciences, e.g., emotions, and well-defined indicators, e.g., touch position and pressure, odors, and localization, is representative of the variety of sensor fields involved. In addition, networked social robotics extends the possibilities of sensor architectures. The dependability of robotics systems is affected by uncertainties typically present in social scenarios. Sensor uncertainties may even remain in the background of those intrinsic to social concepts, not affecting prospective robot skills. The importance of sensing in the context of social robots is thus clear.

This Special Issue aims at highlighting the current panorama and gathering novel ideas emerging in this exciting field.

Dr. João Silva Sequeira
Dr. Rodrigo Ventura
Guest Editors

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. Sensors 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 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.