Dear Colleagues,

It is our pleasure to announce the opening of a new Special Issue of Applied Science.

The main topic of the special issue is the advancement of robot learning and motor control algorithms and their application.

Tasks that seem natural to humans are often tricky for robots or artificial agents, furthermore, often they are difficult to implement – to program. Hard-to-engineer robot tasks are being tackled by learning algorithms not only in academic and research environments – robot learning has progressed into all aspects of robot applications and use, be it in industry, rehabilitation, assistive robotics, or in entertainment applications. Robot learning has made giant strides towards making robots capable of performing complex tasks and acting independently in unstructured environments. From learning by demonstration, reinforcement learning, policy search, evolutionary algorithms and the recent success of deep reinforcement learning algorithms, the field is continually pushing the boundaries. That robots are breaking out of factories has become yesterday’s news. Thus, the progress of robot learning has drastically changed the landscape of the applicability of robots. Going hand-in-hand with machine learning and exploiting deep learning techniques, have made robot learning one of the best prospects for technology with the potential to radically change our future. But to change the future, the foundations need to be firm.

This Special Issue is set to present the newest findings, approaches and results in the field of robot learning and motor control, providing an overview of the possibilities of today and the prospect for the future.

Dr. Andrej Gams
Dr. Loris Roveda
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Robot learning
• Motor control
• Deep neural networks
• Robot skill learning
• Perception–action coupling
• Motion adaptation