Collaborative Robotics in the 21st Century

Dear Colleagues,

The development of innovative industrial manipulators has been supported by advancements in sensors and force control systems. As a result, manipulators can coexist and interact with operators, machinery, and products in a completely new way, allowing people to re-imagine  the production space and manufacturing processes. This approach maximizes the speed and precision capabilities of manipulators with human reasoning and planning capabilities.

In industry, cobots are being used as tireless work assistants, and it is necessary to maximize operators’ safety and productivity. Cobots' inherent flexibility allow them to be extensively deployed in small- and medium-sized industries, introducing new market niches and applications.

This innovative approach, where the manipulator is free of protective restrictions, will allow the cobot to be integrated into more challenging spaces and applications, such as service cobots in public spaces, home help, hospital care, or nursing home care.

Therefore, this Special Issue aims to gather original research and review articles on advances, technologies, applications, and new challenges in the study of collaborative robotics to address safer and more flexible, efficient, and dexterous tasks.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- Sensory strategies to avoid hazards in the workspace;
- Sensor-based strategies to recognize and predict human movements;
- Human–cobot interaction experiences based on sensors; 
- New cobot programming methods; 
- New collaborative manipulation planning procedures;
- Innovative industrial applications of collaborative robotics;
- SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) cobot applications; 
- Non-industrial applications for cobots;
- Definition of multi-robot strategies with cobots;
- New collaborative grasping strategies.

Prof. Dr. Belén Curto
Dr. Vidal Moreno Rodilla
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 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.

• sensing
• human interaction
• programming
• grasping
• path planning
• collision detection
• force-based control
• deep learning