Scope

T-FR is a new scholarly journal dealing with the fundamentals of robotics in unstructured and dynamic environments.  The journal focuses on methods and systems designed to operate outside the built environment, where the ambient conditions can’t be controlled and the scale is much larger than found indoors.  Articles describing research with applications in construction, forestry, agriculture, mining, subsea, intelligent highways, search and rescue, military, and space are encouraged. Papers in sensing, sensors, mechanical design, computing architectures, communication, planning, learning, and control, applied to field applications are encouraged.

We encourage publication of work that has both theoretical and practical significance. Authors are encouraged to implement their work and demonstrate its utility on significant problems with emphasis on the underlying principles. That is, the journal encourages reporting on what was learned in doing the work, rather than merely on what was done. Also encouraged are comparative or meta-studies and verification of previously published results as well as reports of extended field experiments that seek to validate autonomous systems in representative environments.  Systems papers are welcome but they must include analysis and insight into why approaches work and the challenges still to be addressed. Studies of systems that have been fielded over extended durations are encouraged. 

Goals

Field Robotics is dedicated to the rapid dissemination of important research results in Field Robotics. Articles published in Field Robotics must meet the highest quality standards, as measured by originality and significance of the contribution to our understanding of how to devise, create, analyze and operate robots in their intended application domain. The journal will publish only articles of high quality rather than seeking a particular number of papers or a ratio of accepted papers to those submitted.  Field Robotics will not publish articles in which the experimental validation is restricted to simulation or controlled laboratory experiments.