Guest Editorial Special Section on Recent Trends and Developments in Industry 4.0 Motivated Robotic Solutions

The twelve papers in this special section focus on the development of robotic solutions for smart factories in industry - the concept of the fourth industrial revolution (industry 4.0). The inclusion of robotics is expected to deeply change the future manufacturing and production processes, and lead to smart factories that will benefit from the main design principles of Industry 4.0: interoperability, virtualization, decentralization, real-time capability, service orientation, and modularity. Robotics will have a key role in this development since innovative technologies and solutions, traditionally associated with the service robotics sector, are going to migrate to industrial smarter robots, exploiting the maturing of navigation, localization, sensing, and motion control technologies. These smarter robots will draw on a much broader range of technology, allowing higher levels of dexterity and flexibility, the ability to learn tasks without formal programming, and to autonomously collaborate with other autonomous devices and human operators.