Topic: Collaborative Robots and Applications

Human civilization can be partially reflected by the level and scope of the automation of intelligent systems to replace human operations and decision support, and the robots' roles are becoming increasingly important in the digitization of our human society. Robots' capabilities are determined by their intelligence levels in dealing with complexity, dynamics and uncertainties in various applications; however, in many cases, robots can be greatly beneficial by collaborating with people to fulfill complex tasks, especially in open and unstructured environments. A collaborative robot, or cobot, utilizes the human's capabilities in sensing, perceiving, and decision-making to improve the adaptability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness of robotic automation. The study on collaborative robots has attracted much attention to the Intelligence and Robotics community. This Special Issue aims to solicit new contributions to the developments and applications of cobots. The topics of interest include but are not limited to:
● New designs of collaborative robots;
● New applications of Universal robots, ABB YuMi and GoFa, Kinova Gen, Yaskawa HC, Fanuc CRX, Aubo, and other commercial cobots;
● Human-robot interactions, human-robot interfaces, brain-computer interfaces;
● Wearable technologies, haptic technologies, hardware-in-loop;
● Safety assurance, assessment, monitoring and metrics, and controls;
● Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), path planning, and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM);
● Sensing devices and situational awareness;
● Sensor-riven robotic programming;
● Swarm robots, surgical robots, agriculture robots, service robots, and assistive robots;
● Open robotics systems (ORS), virtual reality (VR), argument reality (AR), extended reality (ER), robot development platforms;
● Learning and transferring human skills to robotic manipulators.