Dear Colleagues, 

Digital twins (DTs) constitute an emergent class of enabling technologies: virtual systems replicating, monitoring, predicting, and improving the processes and features of physical systems, known as their physical twins (PTs). Such digital replicas are based on data-intensive network-based computational solutions connected in real-time with their real counterpart. However, the research effort to implement and validate DTs in different applied fields—from industry to healthcare—is still at its dawn, especially considering how they can be intertwined with other enabling technologies such as robotic systems. Indeed, DTs can offer versatile tools for optimizing the design, capabilities, and maintenance of mechatronic devices in heterogeneous contexts. It is also important to ponder how robots can interact with humans, constituting an even higher level of complexity in the challenge of modeling and predicting their conditions and behaviors. Accordingly, novel interdisciplinary approaches should enable solutions for twining any system constituted or including mechatronic devices, especially considering how we can have robotic tools, robotic agents, and even robotic environments. 

This Special Issue aims to collect and organize the literature on novel approaches, cases, and investigations on “Digital Twins in Robotics”. We welcome the submission of any type of paper on topics such as:

1. Digital twins in robotics and related infrastructures for simulation and modeling;
2. Applications of Internet of Things, big data, and extended reality to digital twins in robotics;
3. Applications of wearable technologies and computing to digital twins in robotics;
4. Digital twins in robotics and cobotics for industrial applications;
5. Digital twins in robotics for healthcare, surgery, assistance, rehabilitation, and prosthetics;
6. Digital twins in robotics for education and training;
7. Interacting with digital twins (and Phygital twins) in robotics;
8. Digital twins in human–robot interaction design and robot ergonomics;
9. Ethical and legal issues of digital twins in robotics.

Dr. Giacinto Barresi
Dr. Dejiu Chen
Prof. Dr. Giuseppe Carbone
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• digital twins
• robotics
• human–robot interaction
• simulation
• ergonomics
• computational models