Call for Papers

Distributed intelligence in robotics and autonomous systems applications heavily relies upon seamless wireless connectivity. In particular, the emerging cloud robotics paradigm aims to employ communication technologies for offloading high complexity computation tasks to the edge/cloud platform. Cloud robotics is considered as one of the mainstream use-case for 5G and beyond networks which requires ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC).

Currently, the design of URLLC protocols has been explored by the research community in an application-agnostic manner. While promising, these horizontal design approaches can only provide limited performance gains. Consequently, alternative approaches that are based on co-design of control systems, inference engines, and communication protocols must be explored. These new approaches are envisioned to enable the rapid deployment of new robotics applications.

While new robotics applications are benefiting from the advancements in communication technology, communication networks are also hugely benefiting from the recent advancement in mobile robotics platforms. Low-cost commercially available robotics platforms are increasingly being employed for the rapid deployment of mobile connectivity services. The applications for such deployments range from flash crowd events to public safety systems. Integration of robotics and autonomous systems into communication network architecture while addressing issues such as interference and mobility management is therefore as crucial. 

This Feature Topic (FT) aims to provide a platform for presenting recent advancements that tackle the design and implementation of: i. communication protocols for robotics and autonomous systems; and ii. architectures/deployment modalities that exploit robotics and autonomous systems for provisioning communication services. This FT uniquely calls for the study of both wireless communication solutions for and through robotic platforms. Consequently, the topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

• Spectrum and Resource management for MEC enabled robotics applications;
• Co-design of control, communication, and edge inference mechanisms;
• Network slicing for robotics applications;
• Design and implementation of mobility aware communication protocols;
• Design and development of high precision localization services;
• Coverage aware trajectory planners for robotics and autonomous systems;
• Network architecture with mobile base-stations and management protocols;
• Security and resilience mechanisms for MEC enabled robotics applications;
• Optimization of connectivity protocol for Augmented reality (AR) and Virtual reality (VR) robotics applications;
• Time-sensitive and Deterministic Wireless Networks;

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the Information for Authors section of the Manuscript Submission Guidelines. Please, check these guidelines carefully before submitting since submissions not complying with them will be administratively rejected without review.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Manuscript Central. Select the “January 2021/Communication Technologies for Robotics and Autonomous Systems” topic from the drop-down menu of Topic/Series titles. Please observe the dates specified here below noting that there will be no extension of submission deadline.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 15 July 2020, 16:00 pm NYC time (EDT)
Decision Notification: 1 October 2020
Final Manuscript Due: 15 November 2020
Publication Date: January 2021

Guest Editors

Syed Ali Raza Zaidi
University of Leeds, UK

Ursula Challita
Ericsson, Sweden

Jemin Lee
DGIST, South Korea

Moe Z. Win
MIT, USA