Special Issue on Small-Scale Robots in the Medical Context, From Modeling and Fabrication to Clinical Applications

 

Motivation

Small scale robotics is an emerging robotic field, promising novel revolutionary solutions in the healthcare (e.g., targeted therapeutic delivery, and minimally invasive interventions). For these miniature (millimeter to nanometer scale) robots to be successful, a huge progress has been made during the past decade which includes advancements in the fabrication of microrobots, and small-scale soft robots, as well as diverse actuation techniques and control strategies. All these efforts made robotics at small scale a thriving community within the wider robotics society. With many proofs of concept made reality over the past decade, now the community is moving toward in-vivo/preclinical and clinical applications of these robots and is attracting clinicians as well as medical robotics companies.

This special issue invites novel innovative papers in IEEE RAL format, that focus on the recent developments in the fabrication, sensing, actuation, and control of milli/micro/nanorobots in the medical context. More specifically, the special issue includes but not limited to the robotics and automation aspects of these miniaturized robots for the targeted drug delivery, diagnosis, hyperthermia, and minimally invasive surgery. We invite research works encompassing the in silico, in vitro, in vivo, pre-clinical, clinical studies of the medical milli/micro/nanorobot.

 

List of topics

Topics of interest for this special issue include and are not limited to:

·       Soft Miniature Robots

·       Swarm of micro/nanorobots

·       Mechatronics Systems for Small Scale Robotics

·       Sensing and monitoring at small scale

·       Actuation of miniature robots

·       Autonomous robotics at small scale

·       Medical imaging for real-time control

 

 

Timeline

The special issue will follow the following timeline:

 

15 January 2022	Call for Papers
1 September 2022	Papercept open for submission
30 September 2022	Submission deadline
26 December 2022	Authors receive RA-L reviews and recommendation
10 January 2023	Authors of accepted MS submit final RA-L version
26 January 2023	Authors of R&R MS resubmit revised MS
1 March 2023	Authors receive final RA-L decision
15 March 2023	Authors submit final RA-L files
20 March 2023	Camera ready version appears in RA-L on Xplore
30 March 2023	Final Publication

 

 

Guest Editors

 

Photo	Guest Editor Information
	Name: Ali Kafash Hoshiar Affiliation: School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Colchester, UK  e-mail: A.Kafashhoshiar@Essex.ac.uk
	Name: Kanty Rabenorosoa Affiliation: FEMTO-ST: Besancon, Franche-Comté, FR   e-mail: kanty.rabenorosoa@femto-st.fr
	Name: Tiantian XU Affiliation: Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China e-mail: tt.xu@siat.ac.cn
	Name: Hakan Ceylan Affiliation: Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science, Scottsdale, United States Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart, Germany e-mail: ceylan@is.mpg.de
	Name: Eric Diller Affiliation: University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada e-mail: ediller@mie.utoronto.ca
	Name: Li Zhang Affiliation: The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), Hong Kong, China e-mail: lizhang@cuhk.edu.hk
	Name: Hongsoo Choi Affiliation: Department of Robotics Engineering, DGIST, Daegu, Republic of Korea DGIST-ETH Microrobotics Research Center, DGIST, Daegu, Republic of Korea e-mail: Mems@DGIST.ac.kr