Special Issue on Vehicle-Terrain Interaction for Mobile Robots
Special Issue Guest Editors: Danwei Wang, Nanyang Technological University, Philippe Martinet, Université Blaise Pascal & Karl Iagnemma, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This special issue focuses on state-of-the-art developments in modeling, estimation, motion planning, and control of all terrain mobile robots with significant vehicle-terrain interaction effects. Mobility in outdoor unstructured or semi-structured environments is an important consideration for mobile robotic systems. Modeling and estimation of the contact between tire (or track, foot, or other appendage) and ground, control performance robustness to uncertainties and disturbances, path/trajectory generation over 3D terrain, and precise trajectory tracking in dynamic environments, represent challenging issues in our scientific community. This special issue will stimulate interest and provides motivation for further research and development in intelligent transportation and autonomous robotics.
We invite papers that exhibit theory and methods applied to modeling, estimation, path planning and control of all terrain mobile robots with vehicle-terrain interactions. Topics are including, but not limited to:
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•modeling of interaction between the robot running gear and terrain, including analysis of the interaction between wheels, tracks, feet, or other appendages with soil, vegetation, or other natural materials;
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•description of uncertainties to vehicle motions, such as skidding/ slipping, and methods for explicit consideration of these uncertainties in planning and control;
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•methods for sensing, sensor fusion, and estimation in the presence of terrain-induced perturbations
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•experiments in posture estimation, data fusion, and control implementation;
Papers for this special issue must also provide technical descriptions of systems and results and analysis of experimentation. For this special issue, experimental verification via field experiments is considered essential.
Important Dates:
February 1, 2009- Submission of manuscripts
May 1, 2009- Reviews sent to the authors
August 1, 2009- Final manuscripts due for publication
Authors interested in submitting to this issue can discuss submissions with the special issue editors: Danwei Wang (edwwang@ntu.edu.sg), Philippe Martinet (Philippe.Martinet@lasmea.univ-bpclermont.fr) and Karl Iagnemma (kdi@mit.edu)
Special Issue on Three-Dimensional Mapping
Special Issue Guest Editors: Patrick Pfaff, Kuka Roboter GmbH, Wolfram Burgard, University of Freiburg.
Recently, three-dimensional representations of environments have gained substantial interest in the robotics community as such maps provide better support for a wide variety of tasks including navigation, localization, and perception. For example, robots that know about the three-dimensional structure of the environment can better avoid obstacles, can more reliably localize themselves, and can more robustly detect objects. Accordingly, three-dimensional representations provide benefits in all applications in which robots are deployed in real-world scenarios. Additionally, three-dimensional models of environments are envisioned to be useful in a wide area of applications, which goes far beyond robotics, like architecture, emergency planning, interaction, and visualization. In all of these application domains, there is a need for methods that can automatically construct 3D-models. The goal of this special issue of the Journal of Field Robotics is to collect recent advances and state-of-the-art results in the area of learning three-dimensional maps with mobile robots with a particular emphasis on fielded systems and systems that operate in unstructured and dynamic environments.
We particularly seek papers that both cover fundamental aspects of mapping along with those that describe the acquisition or maintenance of three-dimensional representations in natural, unstructured environments.
Authors are invited to submit papers that cover relevant areas of three-dimensional mapping for field robotic systems including (but not limited to) stereo vision, autonomous cars, navigation, dynamic objects, cooperative systems, approximation and reconstruction techniques, and 3D-SLAM.
Important Dates:
January 5, 2009- Submission of manuscripts
April 5, 2009 - Reviews sent to the authors
July 5, 2009- Final manuscripts due for publication
For comments, suggestions, or requests, please send email to Pfaff Patrick <PatrickPfaff@kuka-roboter.de> or Wolfram Burgard <burgard@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>
