Research Advances in AI-Driven Robotics and Automation

Dear Colleagues,

Industry and healthcare are entering a new stage of automation, driven by rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, sensing technologies, connectivity, and cyber–physical systems. AI-driven robotics extends automation beyond strictly structured and repetitive tasks to flexible, adaptive, and safety-critical operations—such as industrial material handling, machine tending, and inspection and quality control, as well as surgical assistance, rehabilitation, hospital logistics, medical device handling, and safe human–robot collaboration in clinical environments. At the same time, the deployment of AI-based robotic solutions in both industrial and medical contexts presents persistent challenges related to robustness, safety, real-time constraints, interoperability, maintenance, regulatory compliance, and performance validation under significant variability in products, processes, patients, and operating environments.

This Special Issue, “Research Advances in AI-Driven Robotics and Automation”, aims to publish high-quality, original research articles that advance both the methodological foundations and the practical engineering, deployment, and validation of AI-driven robotics and automation systems across industrial and medical domains. We particularly encourage contributions that bridge scientific innovation with real-world relevance, including integration into production systems and healthcare infrastructures, implementation on usable platforms in operational factory or clinical environments, experimental and clinical validation, benchmarking, and case studies demonstrating measurable improvements in productivity, quality, resilience, safety, and patient outcomes. Submissions may focus on algorithms, system architectures, or complete robotic solutions, provided they are grounded in realistic scenarios and supported by rigorous experimental, simulation-based, or clinical evaluations.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, machine learning methods for industrial perception and inspection and medical imaging and sensing (vision/3D perception, defect detection, metrology, image-guided intervention); adaptive planning and control for flexible automation and patient-specific treatment; reinforcement learning and imitation learning for industrial and medical robotic tasks; manipulation and grasping under variable and uncertain conditions; autonomous mobile robots for intralogistics and hospital logistics; multi-robot coordination in industrial operations and healthcare workflows; digital twins and simulation-assisted engineering for production systems and patient-specific modeling; edge and real-time AI for latency-critical applications; predictive maintenance and anomaly detection for industrial equipment and medical robotic systems; integration with industrial and healthcare software ecosystems; cybersecurity considerations, as well as safety assurance, verification and validation; and trustworthy deployment of AI-driven robotic systems.

This Special Issue will publish high-quality, original research papers in the following overlapping fields:

• AI-enabled industrial and medical robotics, including intelligent automation systems for manufacturing, surgical robotics, rehabilitation, assistive devices, and hospital automation;
• Machine vision, medical imaging, 3D perception, and multimodal sensor fusion for inspection and quality control in industry, as well as diagnosis, image-guided procedures, and clinical decision support;
• Learning-based manipulation, grasping, and assembly, spanning industrial production tasks and dexterous handling of medical instruments, devices, and delicate biological materials;
• Adaptive planning and control under uncertainty (hybrid model- and learning-based approaches) for variable production environments, patient-specific treatments, and interaction with deformable objects and anatomy;
• Human–robot collaboration and shared workspaces, including industrial cobots working alongside operators and clinician–robot cooperation with strong safety and ergonomic constraints;
• Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) for intralogistics and factory navigation, as well as hospital logistics, service robots, and navigation in complex healthcare facilities;
• Multi-robot coordination and scheduling for industrial operations, warehouse systems, surgical workflows, rehabilitation scenarios, and healthcare facility management;
• Digital twins, simulation, and data-driven development workflows for industrial systems, medical robots, and patient-specific modeling, training, and validation prior to real-world deployment;
• Edge AI, real-time inference, embedded platforms, and energy-aware computing for industrial robots, wearable medical devices, surgical systems, and latency-critical applications;
• Condition monitoring, anomaly detection, fault diagnosis, and predictive maintenance applied to manufacturing equipment and safety-critical medical robotic systems;
• Integration with Industry 4.0 and Healthcare 4.0 architectures, including IIoT/MIoT, MES/SCADA, hospital information systems, interoperability standards, and secure connectivity;
• Verification, validation, robustness, cybersecurity, and trustworthy AI, addressing reliability, safety, regulatory compliance, and ethical considerations in both industrial and medical robotics. 

We aim for this Special Issue to serve as a platform for dialogue between research and practice, bringing together contributions from robotics, automation, artificial intelligence, systems engineering, digital manufacturing, and medical technology. We invite both method-oriented research papers and well-documented industrial and clinical case studies that can inform and guide the design, validation, and deployment of the next generation of AI-driven robotic solutions across industrial automation and healthcare applications. 

Prof. Dr. Alexandru Tugui
Prof. Dr. Adrian Iftene
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 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.

• AI-driven robotics
• robotics and intelligent automation
• industrial and medical robotics
• surgical robotics
• rehabilitation and assistive robots
• human–robot collaboration
• cobots
• smart manufacturing and Healthcare 4.0
• Industry 4.0
• Medical IoT (MIoT)
• machine vision and medical imaging
• quality inspection and clinical quality assurance
• defect detection and anomaly detection
• 3D perception
• multimodal sensor fusion
• reinforcement learning
• imitation learning
• learning-based control
• edge AI
• real-time robotics
• wearable and embedded robotic systems
• predictive maintenance and system health monitoring
• safety-critical and trustworthy AI