Advanced Robotics

Intelligent Mobile Manipulation for Inspection and Physical Intervention

Mobile robots are increasingly transitioning from systems that primarily navigate and observe their surroundings toward autonomous agents capable of physically interacting with complex real-world environment.

Applications such as industrial inspection, infrastructure maintenance, agriculture, logistics, service robotics, and operations in hazardous environments require robots not only to perceive and inspect their surroundings, but also to manipulate equipment, operate tools, deploy sensors, collect samples, move objects, and perform physical interventions.

These tasks require the seamless integration of mobility, perception, reasoning, planning, and manipulation. While substantial progress has been achieved in each individual field, robust integration remains a major challenge. Real-world mobile manipulation must address partial observability, localization and perception uncertainty, dynamic environments, constrained manipulation spaces, interaction safety, limited computational resources, and the coupling between navigation and physical interaction.

Recent advances in embodied AI, multimodal perception, semantic world models, learning-based manipulation, whole-body control, foundation models and edge intelligence provide new opportunities for developing robots capable of autonomously progressing from observation and inspection to decision-making and physical intervention.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

・Mobile manipulation and loco-manipulation

・ Autonomous inspection and intervention

・Navigation–manipulation integration

・ Task and motion planning

・Whole-body planning and control

・ Active perception and multimodal sensing

・ Semantic world models and robotic reasoning

・ Embodied AI and foundation models

・Learning-based manipulation

・ Vision-language-action models

・Manipulation under uncertainty

・Robot interaction with tools and equipment

・Sensor and device deployment

・ Multi-robot inspection and manipulation

・ Robot–IoT collaboration

・Edge AI for robotic autonomy

・Sim-to-real transfer

・Safety and robustness

・Real-world benchmarks and experimental validation

・Industrial, infrastructure, agricultural, field, logistics, and service applications

We particularly encourage submissions that demonstrate the integration of perception, mobility, decision-making, and physical interaction on real robotic systems.

The aim of this Special Issue is to highlight emerging approaches that move mobile robotics beyond autonomous observation toward robots capable of understanding, interacting with, and physically modifying their environments.