Special Issue on Biomimetic Perception, Cognition, and Control: From Nature to Robots

In recent years, biomimetic technologies have emerged as a key theme in robotics research. Biomimetics has been employed to advance the development of cognitive and collaborative functionalities as well as improving the dexterous and versatile manipulation capabilities of robots. This progress has been enabled by a multi-disciplinary approach, including new materials, bio-inspired actuators, human motor control, and AI algorithms. By mimicking natural creatures, robots can translate biological principles into improved artificial methods for perception, cognition and cooperation, particularly for interactive tasks with humans. Such robots are able to support the disabled, take care of the elderly, and play with children in a more assistive and human-friendly manner.

Unfortunately, although biomimetic technologies have been investigated by roboticists in different fields, a comprehensive and holistic approach to integrate these separate advancements is missing. One might anticipate that far greater impact can be achieved when a co-robot is equipped with biomimetic hardware and software for perception, cognition and control. For example, bionic manipulations may only be realized with multi-modal sensors that actively perceive their environment with signals as informative as those encoded biologically, under the guidance of skill learning and task-planning methods. To help overcome these technological barriers and provide a cross-disciplinary platform for future advances, this special issue aims to integrate various research fields under the common background of biomimetic intelligent robotics.

This special issue will cover the subjects including intelligent sensors, biomimetic mechanical design, robotic cognition-related learning, bioinspired control, and human-friendly interaction. This issue will focus on recent progress and new multi-disciplinary biomimetic technologies that have practical potential and the potential for profound impact on the real world. We welcome submissions from all related topics in academic research and industry, including but not limited to the following:

Intelligent sensors (e.g., vision, tactile etc.) for perception and exploration
Mechanical design of biomimetic robots
Advanced multimodal sensing information fusion
Computational neuroscience of perception and action
Intelligent learning methods from a biomimetic view
Learning from Demonstrations
Bioinspired robotic learning and control
Applications of biomimetic robotics in industry, e.g., manipulation, robot assisted surgery.
Other related topics

Important Dates
1 February 2022- Submission deadline
1 May 2022- First decision to authors
15 June 2022- Revised paper
20 August 2022- Final acceptance decision
10 September 2022- Final manuscripts
20 September 2022- Guest Editorial Due
December 2022 Publication

Guest Editors:

Professor Chenguang Yang