Guest Editorial: Communication Technologies for Robotics and Autonomous Systems

The increased deployment of robots to automate repetitive, high precision, and difficult tasks is a key enabler for the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Robots and autonomous systems (RAS) provide significant productivity gains by allowing flexible production lines that can be dynamically reconfigured to manufacture highly customized products. However, such flexibility can only be harnessed when RAS are intelligent enough to adapt, communicate, and interact with one another and the operators, regardless of the operational environment.