Special Track

Intelligent Inspection with Autonomous Robots in Confined and GPS-denied Environments: Challenges, Advances and Future Research

Autonomous robots have received the increasing interests in conducting robotized automatic inspection tasks inside many important industrial facilities such as large water tanks, oil & gas pressure vessels, penstocks and boilers etc. They can offer greater levels of flexibility and adaptability, allowing the autonomous robots to perform various tasks more efficiently than the human counterpart, which is often inefficient, laborious, high cost and has the potential safety and health problems. However, adopting the autonomous robots for this kind of complex inspections also presents significant challenges to address in both research and real-world applications.

The special track therefore aims to bring the leading researchers worldwide in the area to address and discuss the challenges with the focus on the recent advances, future research directions, solutions and showcase examples etc, in particular around high confidence and trusted modelling and simulation as well as reliable high-quality programming of the autonomous robotic system coupled with challenging application environments.

The special track topics include, but not limited to advanced modelling and simulation of autonomous robots for inspections, Digital Twinning technology for autonomous robots, reliable high-quality programming of the autonomous robotic systems, adaptive control of autonomous robots, intelligent sensing for indoor environmental perceptions, smart navigation and intelligent path planning, high-precision positioning, intelligent decision- making, collision avoidance and intelligent defect detection for accurate and efficient inspection, etc.

All accepted papers will be hosted on IEEE Xplore as peer-reviewed archival publications (one full conference registration is required). Prospective authors are invited to submit high-quality papers representing original work.

Important Dates

Full Workshop paper submission date):  15th February 2025

Notification of acceptance date: 1st March 2025

Final Workshop paper submission date: 15th March 2025

Workshop date: 18th April 2025

All submissions will be handled electronically via the conference’s CMT Website by selecting the track W4: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/IEEESIMPAR2025

Please, follow the submission instructions for the conference. 

Organizers:
       Dr. Erfu Yang (Senior Member, IEEE) received his Ph.D. in Robotics from the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Colchester, UK, in 2008. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Design, Manufacturing and Engineering Management (DMEM), University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. His main research interests include robotics, autonomous systems, mechatronics, manufacturing automation, signal and image processing, computer vision, machine learning applications, and artificial intelligence. He has over 180 publications in these areas, including over 80 journal papers and 10 book chapters. Dr. Yang has been awarded over 15 research grants as PI (principal investigator) or CI (co-investigator). He is the Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, Member of the UK Engineering Professors’ Council, Senior Member of the IEEE Society of Robotics and Automation, IEEE Control Systems Society,  Engagement Chair of the IEEE UK and Ireland Industry Applications Chapter, Committee Member of the IET SCOTLAND Manufacturing Technical Network. He is also an associate editor for the Cognitive Computation journal published by Springer, Sensors (MDPI), Frontiers in Robotics and AI (Journal), etc.
      Dr. Carmelo Mineo received a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Palermo (Italy) in 2011. In 2012, he joined the Centre for Ultrasonic Engineering of the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, UK) to undertake his doctoral studies on the automated, non-destructive inspection of large and complex geometries of composite materials. He became a Research Associate at the University of Strathclyde in 2015 and a Research Fellow in 2018. Carmelo was awarded a prestigious H2020 Marie Curie Fellowship in 2020, funded by the European Commission, to lead research on Robotic Adaptive Behaviours for NDT Inspections in Dynamic Contexts at the University of Palermo. He has been a Researcher at the Institute of High-Performance Computing and Networking of the National Research Council of Italy since 2020. His research interests include intelligent and autonomous robotics, advanced robot control for real-time adaptive path planning, instrument and sensor interfacing, and data collection and processing.
     Dr. Beiya Yang (Member, IEEE) received his Ph.D. in high-precision indoor positioning technology from the Department of Design, Manufacturing and Engineering Management (DMEM), University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, in 2023. He is an associate professor in the School of Computer Science at Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China. His current research interests include autonomous robot navigation, indoor positioning, wireless sensor networks, etc.