Swarm Intelligence - Call for Papers: Nano and micro swarm robotics
Examples of self-organisation at the micro and nanoscale, from assembly of new materials, to bacterial biofilm formation, cancer, or tissue organisation, result from very large numbers of tiny agents moving and interacting with their local environment. Understanding and controlling such micro and nanoswarms could lead to breakthroughs in medicine, new functional materials, or de novo lifeforms. Yet discovering these emergent properties, observing them, and engineering them requires an entirely new toolsets that builds on cross-disciplinary integration from microrobotics, synthetic biology, and bio imaging, to swarm engineering, large-scale simulation, and machine learning.
With this special issue, we aim to explore the latest in the engineering of nano and micro robot swarms, including:
- Nano/microrobot swarm design
- Characterisation (e.g. imaging) of nano/microswarms
- Self-assembly at the nano/microscale
- Novel computational tools to simulate nano/microswarms
- Novel control mechanisms and swarm algorithms for nano/microrobots
- Automatic discovery of nano/microswarm strategies using AI
- Bio-hybrid nano/microswarms
- Swarm engineering to understand life at the nano/microscale
- Emergent and embodied intelligent behaviours of nano/microswarms
- Applications of nano/microswarms including biomedical, environmental, manufacturing, and material science
- Nano/microswarms and society: ethics, policy, and regulation
Presubmission enquiry
We recommend the interested authors to submit a presubmission enquiry to Sabine Hauert (sabine.hauert@bristol.ac.uk) prior to submission. A presubmission enquiry must include article title, author list, and abstract (about 200 words). We will assess if the work matches the scope of the special issue and meets the journal’s expectations.
Editors:
Josh Bongard (University of Vermont)
Xiaoguang Dong (Vanderbilt University) Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol)
Metin Sitti (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems)
Submission deadline: 30 June 2023
Submission Guidelines:
Authors should prepare their manuscript according to the Instructions for Authors available from the Swarm Intelligence website (this opens in a new tab). Authors should submit through the online submission site (this opens in a new tab) and select “SI Nano and Micro Swarm Robotics" when they reach the “Article Type” step in the submission process. Submitted papers should present original, unpublished work, relevant to the topics of the special issue. All submitted papers will be evaluated on the basis of relevance, significance of contribution, technical quality, scholarship, and quality of presentation, by at least three independent reviewers. It is the policy of the journal that no submission, or substantially overlapping submission, be published or be under review at another journal or conference at any time during the review process. Final decisions on all papers are made by the Editor in Chief.