Special Issue on Humanoid Robot Applications in Real World Scenarios

Topical Area

We are pleased to invite you to submit your research to the upcoming special issue on ”Humanoid robot applications in real world scenarios”, to be published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine.

Humanoid robotics is a key challenge due to the inherent complexity of locomotion, balancing and interaction with humans or unknown environments. Striving to overcome these diﬃculties, companies, international competitions and research projects have highlighted the potential of bipedal technologies and demonstrated how it is now approaching the level of maturity required for autonomous operation in unstructured environments.

For example, Airbus, inside the COMANOID project, pointed out how other mobile robot designs did not apply to their use case, either because the base of support is too large or the mobility is limited to known environments. Consequently, bipedal humanoid robots became the de facto best viable solution for now. Meanwhile, Honda has advanced its humanoid robot technologies for disaster intervention with the E2-DR prototype and, in the same direction, the WALK-MAN EU Project developed a humanoid robot in collaboration with the Italian Civil Protection to intervene in hazardous environments. Boston Dynamics made available the Atlas robot to participants to the DARPA Robotics Challenge and recently demonstrated extraordinary dynamic motion capabilities, inside and outside the lab, using an upgraded version of the platform. The ﬁgure below shows other examples of advanced humanoid platforms E2-DR, HRP-4, TALOS and TORO, that have been showcased as mature enough to perform tasks in real and unstructured environments.

An increasing number of companies and research institutes are now developing middle and large size humanoid robots for diﬀerent purposes. International projects aim to use these bipeds as human coworkers for industrial manufacturing and warehouse tasks, or tele-operated for inspection and intervention in hazardous environments. These scenarios require advanced locomotion and in-teraction capabilities which are being addressed, not only with classical stiﬀ position control, but also with advanced compliant torque/force control.

Call for Papers

This special issue on humanoid robot applications in real world scenarios will make the research community aware of the latest and upcoming trends in this ﬁeld, which is becoming increasingly appealing to industrial companies, includ-ing actors that were not previously involved in robotics.

In particular, the special issue will report the current state of the art and analyze open issues with the aim of sharing common experience and propose future directions to open problems.

The special issue will target papers in the following research areas:

real applications and use case scenarios of humanoid bipedal robots
hardware design for harsh environments
whole-body multi-contact planning and control for real world applications
loco-manipulation strategies in dynamic environments
agile motion generation and control of humanoid robots
performance benchmarking for bipedal robots
success stories of humanoid technologies

Figure 1: a. HRP-4 and TORO robots, from Kawada Industries and DLR respectively, both applied to aircraft manufacturing scenarios as part of the H2020 EU Project COMANOID, b. Atlas, Boston Dynamics, in a warehouse box-handling scenario, c. Talos, from PAL Robotics, involved in the EU Project MEMMO d. and e. respectively ASIMO, performing weekly public demonstrations in Tokyo, and newly-developed humanoid robot E2-DR for disaster response, both from Honda f. the WALK-MAN robot during the execution of a task in a reconstructed disaster scenario.

Important Dates

15 March 2019: submission deadline
25 April 2019: end of the ﬁrst review round
5 May 2019: ﬁrst decision recommendation to EiC by GEs
12 May 2019: ﬁrst decision communicated to authors by EiC
15 July 2019: revised paper submitted/start of the second round of review
15 August 2019: end of the second review round
10 August 2019: ﬁnal decision recommendation to EiC by GEs
20 August 2019: ﬁnal acceptance decision communicated to authors
1 September 2019: Guest Editorial, Order of Publication and Cover Story/Pictures to EiC by GEs
10 September 2019: ﬁnal manuscripts uploaded by authors
20 September 2019: ﬁnal manuscripts forwarded to publisher
10 December 2019: issue mailed to all members

Guest Editors

Guest Editors will select those contributions that apply humanoid robotics technology with clear practical applications. Through the selection of the recent and advanced contribution in this ﬁeld, we hope to raise awareness and excite-ment in both the academic and industrial communities around the opportunities challenges oﬀered by humanoid robotics.