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Vision, audition, olfactory, tactile and taste are five important senses that human uses to interact with the real world. As facing more and more complex environments, a sensing system is essential for intelligent robots with various types of sensors. To mimic human-like abilities, sensors similar to human perception capabilities are indispensable. However, most research only concentrated on analyzing literature on single-modal sensors and their robotics application.

This study presents a systematic review of five bioinspired senses, especially considering a brief introduction of multimodal sensing applications and predicting current trends and future directions of this field, which may have continuous enlightenments.

This review shows that bioinspired sensors can enable robots to better understand the environment, and multiple sensor combinations can support the robot’s ability to behave intelligently.

The review starts with a brief survey of the biological sensing mechanisms of the five senses, which are followed by their bioinspired electronic counterparts. Their applications in the robots are then reviewed as another emphasis, covering the main application scopes of localization and navigation, objection identification, dexterous manipulation, compliant interaction and so on. Finally, the trends, difficulties and challenges of this research were discussed to help guide future research on intelligent robot sensors.

In this opinion article, the authors share their experiences with and perspectives on course design requirements and barriers when applying challenge-based learning (CBL) in an online sustainability education setting. CBL is an established learning approach for (higher) sustainability education. It enables teachers to engage students with open, real-life grand challenges through inter-/transdisciplinary student team collaboration. However, empirical research is scarce and mainly based on face-to-face CBL case studies. Thus far, the opportunities to apply CBL in online educational settings are also underinvestigated.

Using the TPACK framework, the authors address technological, pedagogical and content knowledge related to CBL and online sustainability education. The integration of the different components is discussed, providing teachers and course designers insight into design requirements and barriers.

This paper supports the promising future of online CBL for sustainability education, especially in the context of inter-/national inter-university collaboration, yet emphasizes the need for deliberate use of online collaboration and teaching tools.

This study proposes and validates an integrated theoretical model involving the theory of planned behavior (TPB), health belief model (HBM), personal norms and information privacy to understand determinants of acceptance and resistance to the use of mobile contact tracing app (MCTA) in a pandemic situation.

This study draws on online surveys of 194 research respondents and uses partial least squares structural equation modeling (PL-SEM) to test the proposed theoretical model.

The study establishes that a positive attitude towards MCTA is the most important predictor of individuals' willingness to use MCTA and resistance to use MCTA. Furthermore, barriers to taking action positively influence resistance to the use of MCTA. Personal norms negatively influence resistance to the use of MCTA. Information privacy showed a negative and positive influence on willingness to use MCTA and use the resistance of MCTA, respectively, but neither was statistically significant. The authors found no significant influence of perceived vulnerability, severity, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control on either acceptance or use resistance of MCTA.

The study has been one of the first in the literature to propose an integrated theoretical model in the investigation of the determinants of acceptance and resistance to the use of MCTA in a single study, thereby increasing the scientific understanding of the factors that can facilitate or inhibit individuals from engaging in the use of a protection technology during a pandemic situation.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-10-2021-0533

This study operationalizes risks in stakeholder dialog (SD). It conceptualizes SD as co-produced organizational discourse and examines the capacities of organizers' and stakeholders' practices to create a shared understanding of an organization’s risks to their mutual benefit. The meetings and online forum of a German public service media (PSM) organization were used as a case study.

The authors applied corpus-driven linguistic discourse analysis (topic modeling) to analyze citizens' (n = 2,452) forum posts (n = 14,744). Conversation analysis was used to examine video-recorded online meetings.

Organizers suspended actors' reciprocity in meetings. In the forums, topics emerged autonomously. Citizens' articulation of their identities was more diverse than the categories the organizer provided, and organizers did not respond to the autonomous emergence of contextualizations of citizens' perceptions of PSM performance in relation to their identities. The results suggest that risks arise from interactionally achieved occasions that prevent reasoned agreement and from actors' practices, which constituted autonomous discursive formations of topics and identities in the forums.

This study disentangles actors' practices, mutuality orientation and risk enactment during SD. It advances the methodological knowledge of strategic communication research on SD, utilizing social constructivist research methods to examine the contingencies of organization-stakeholder interaction in SD.