Submission Deadline: August 31, 2023   October 15, 2023
Publication Date: Advanced Robotics, Vol. 38, Issue 11 (June, 2024)

Nonlinear control technology has played a key role since the inception of robot control. Beyond traditional nonlinearity in local robot dynamics, increasingly complex control systems require addressing nonlinearities at the system level. Recent groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence have opened the door to transforming systems previously treated as just uncertainties, as typified by humans and environment, into nonlinear systems. It is no exaggeration to say that it is more difficult to find a system that is purely closed to the linear world. Despite high maturity of traditional nonlinear control, novel theories and control tools have continued to be developed, e.g. control barrier functions, optimal mass transport, formal methods, and data-driven and learning-based control.  The purpose of this special issue is to present recent theory and practice of nonlinear control technology that can be effectively applied to robotics. It aims at collecting a representative body of innovative theoretical contributions that have potential applications to robotics as well as applicative robotics researches that show successful implementation of recent theory of nonlinear control. Prospective contributed papers are invited to cover, but are not limited to, theoretical and applicative researches on the following topics.

·  nonlinear control theory and application (Lyapunov theory, sliding mode control, control over manifold, etc.)

·  safe control technology

·  nonlinear stochastic control

·  nonlinear model predictive control

·  nonlinear control of multi-robot systems

·  discrete-event systems and hybrid systems including formal methods

·  event/self-triggered control

·  secure and resilient control

·  machine learning and data driven methods

·  human-in-the-loop and human-machine interaction

Takeshi Hatanaka (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)

Yuki Nishimura (Kagoshima University, Japan)

Masaaki Nagahara (The University of Kitakyushu, Japan)

Satoshi Satoh (Osaka University, Japan)

Kazuma Sekiguchi (Tokyo City University, Japan)

Hyo-Sung Ahn (Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Korea)

Jose M. Maestre (University of Seville, Spain)

Srikant Sukumar (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India)

Gennaro Notomista (University of Waterloo, Canada)

The full-length manuscript (either PDF or Microsoft Word file) should be sent to the office of Advanced Robotics, Robotics Society of Japan, through its homepage at: https://www.rsj.or.jp/pub/ar/submission.html 

Templates for the manuscript as well as instructions for the Authors are available at this page.