KaRD 2019 : Kinematics and Robot Design II

Dear Colleagues,

the special issue “Kinematics and Robot Design (KaRD)” launched in 2018 had a discrete success and pushed me to transform this title into a yearly publication, named KaRD series. The KaRD series of open-source special issues, hosted by MDPI Robotics, is characterized by cheap publication costs, which are comparable to the registration fee of a small international congress, and wishes to provide a good opportunity for presenting research results that are immediately readable and usable by other researchers. It appears among a number of serial events (ARK, CK, ASME MR, etc.) devoted to robot and/or mechanism kinematics that serve a numerous scientific community.

Kinematics enters in many aspects of robot design. Type synthesis, dimensional synthesis, kinematic analysis, singularity analysis, workspace determination, performance measures, accuracy analysis, path planning and obstacle avoidance are only some of these. In addition, it is central when building dynamic models for simulation purposes.

Further, robotics is pervading many fields of social interest. For instance, health care with its robotized medical devices and rehabilitation devices needs studies both on human biomechanics and on mechanism synthesis, which involve kinematics.

This 2nd volume of the KaRD series, named KaRD2019, pursues the goal of getting the maximum advantage from its open source nature. In particular, I want to stress that submitting authors
- are able to submit also accompanying multimedia material;
- are immediately able to upload, as a preprint, on https://www.preprints.org/ the paper version submitted for review, where it will receive a DOI and will be readable/citable by other researchers;
- after the possible paper acceptance and the publication on Robotics, are able to upload their published paper on many social networks for researchers (e.g., ResearchGate.net), where they can publically or privately interact with other researchers to start a discussion on the published results.

In short, KaRD series, starting from this special issue, wants to be the reference point of an agora where researchers present and discuss their results, and I warmly invite all the authors to get these opportunities.

The special issue aims at collecting recent researches in the field. Nevertheless, review papers are welcome, too. For further details, visit the website.

Submission Deadline: June 30, 2019
Raffaele Di Gregorio
Guest Editor