Special Issue on Movement Science for Humans and Humanoids: Methods and Applications

Aims and Scope

Over the past three decades, computationally efficient techniques for the analysis, simulation, and optimization of articulated bodies have been developed by the robotics and mathematical communities.  With recent advances in computational power and improvedalgorithms, these techniques are being applied to increasingly complex structures like the human body. More generally, the use of robotics formalisms for quantitative human motion analysis and synthesis is enabling new applications in, e.g., medical diagnosis, monitoring and feedback during rehabilitation and sports training, animation, ergonomic analysis and design, and improved rehabilitation and assistive robots and devices.  At the same time, methods initially developed for human motion analysis in other fields like biomechanics, neuroscience, computer graphics, and computer vision are increasingly being used in robotics, in topics ranging from human-robot interaction to imitation learning.

 This special issue seeks submissions describing novel work synthesizing multidisciplinary techniques for human and humanoid motion analysis, synthesis, and control. Topics of interest include:

  • Kinematic and dynamic modeling and analysis of the human body

  • Dynamic parameter estimation and optimum experimental design

  • Optimal control of human and humanoid motions

  • Inverse optimal control for identification of objective functions during human motor control

  • Motion recognition, segmentation, modeling, and analysis

  • Quantitative analysis methods for rehabilitation and sports training

  • Robotics techniques for animation 

  • Neuromuscular control 

  • Musculoskeletal dynamics

  • Rehabilitation robotics

  • Human motion analysis and understanding for imitation learning and human-robot interaction 

  • Human-inspired control algorithms for robots

  • Model-predictive control for movement science

  • Human movement informing the design and control of assistive devices, exoskeletons and prostheses 

  • Robotics-based motion synthesis 

Contributions must have a central connection to robotics; pure psychomotor or biomechanics studies are outside the scope of this special issue. Interested authors are encouraged to contact the special issue editors with an abstract of their paper to confirm that their submission is within the scope of the special issue. Abstracts should be sent via email to dana.kulic@uwaterloo.ca.

Important Dates

1 March 2015 - Call for Papers
Deadline for Initial Paper Submission: Submissions now closed
15 October 2015 - Decisions for First Round Review
Deadline for Revised Paper Submission:  Submissions now closed
February or April 2016 - Target Publication Date: 

Guest Editors

Dana Kulic, University of Waterloo
Katsu Yamane, Disney Research
Gentiane Venture, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology
Emel Demircan, University of Tokyo/Stanford University 
Katja Mombaur, University of Heidelberg

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