Special issue on SICE Annual Conference 2021

The Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE) annually organizes an international conference covering a broad range of fields from measurement and control to system analysis and design, from theory to application, and from software to hardware. In 2021, the SICE annual conference was held on 8–10 September in an online format due to COVID-19. The technical programme consisted of five plenary talks including one sponsored talk, technical sessions, one tutorial, and three workshops. The technical sessions included 9 special sessions (2 special panel sessions), and 61 traditional general sessions (24 organized sessions and 37 regular sessions). There were 298 presentations from 12 countries including Japan, China, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, Slovenia, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, and Afghanistan. It was successfully held with more than 490 participants. This special issue of SICE JCMSI was planned to gather and disseminate high-quality researches based on extensions of the results presented as Regular Papers in the SICE Annual Conference 2021, and improved expositions of the high-quality results presented as Position Papers in the conference. As a result, 22 papers were submitted to this special issue. Several papers which were not produced in time will appear in regular issues. This special issue received papers from a broad range of research fields covering measurement, control, system integration, system and information, industrial applications, and life engineering. The studies reported in this issue range from algorithmic developments to experimental achievements. The tackled problems include optimization, learning, modelling, identification, image estimation, nondestructive inner inspection, adaptive control, data-driven control, swarm robotics, chemical plants, high-mobility robots, concrete structures, quantum computation, and many other theoretical and practical challenges. Reading the papers in this special issue, you can explore some of the interesting and inspiring trends in the research fields promoted by the SICE.