With the progress and development of human-robot systems, the coordination among humans, robots, and environments has become increasingly sophisticated. In this Research Topic, we focus on an important field in robotics and automation disciplines, which is commonly defined as behavior-assistant robots. The scope includes but is not limited to: (1) rehabilitation assistive devices, such as rigid/soft exoskeletons, prosthetic systems, orthoses, and intelligent wheelchairs; (2) intelligent medical systems, such as endoscopic robots, surgical robots, and the navigation systems; (3) industrial application devices, such as collaborative manipulators, load-bearing exoskeletons, supernumerary robotic limbs; (4) intelligent domestic devices, such as mobile robots, elderly-care robots, walking-aids robots and so on. The emergence of robot-assisted daily behaviors, based on aforementioned devices, is gradually becoming part of our social lives, which can improve weak motor abilities, enhance physical functionalities, and enable various other benefits.

This book disseminates the latest research achievements, findings, and ideas in the robotics field, with particular attention to the Italian scenario. Book coverage includes topics that are related to the theory, design, practice, and applications of robots, such as robot design and kinematics, dynamics of robots and multi-body systems, linkages and manipulators, control of robotic systems, trajectory planning and optimization, innovative robots and applications, industrial robotics, collaborative robotics, medical robotics, assistive robotics, and service robotics. Book contributions include, but are not limited to, revised and substantially extended versions of selected papers that have been presented at the 2nd International Conference of IFToMM Italy (IFIT 2018).

This book presents recent advances in the field of intelligent systems. Composed of fourteen selected chapters, it covers a wide range of research that varies from applications in industrial data science to those in applied science. Today the word INNOVATION is more and more connected with the words INTELLIGENT and SECURITY, as such the book discusses the theory and applications of hot topics such as big data, education applications of robots with different levels of autonomy, knowledge-based modeling and control of complex dynamical systems, sign-based synthesis of behavior, security issues with intelligent systems, innovative intelligent control design, neuromorphic computation, data-driven classification, intelligent modeling and measurement innovations, multisensor data association, personal education assistants, a modern production architecture, study of peer review and scientometrics, intelligent research on bug report data, and clustering non-Gaussian data. The broad and varied research discussed represents the mainstream of contemporary intelligent innovations that are slowly but surely changing the world.

The two-volume set LNCS 4190 and LNCS 4191 constitute the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2006. The program committee carefully selected 39 revised full papers and 193 revised poster papers for presentation in two volumes. This first volume includes 114 contributions related to bone shape analysis, robotics and tracking, segmentation, analysis of diffusion tensor MRI, and much more.

The market demand for skills, knowledge and adaptability have positioned robotics to be an important field in both engineering and science. One of the most highly visible applications of robotics has been the robotic automation of many industrial tasks in factories. In the future, a new era will come in which we will see a greater success for robotics in non-industrial environments. In order to anticipate a wider deployment of intelligent and autonomous robots for tasks such as manufacturing, healthcare, ent- tainment, search and rescue, surveillance, exploration, and security missions, it is essential to push the frontier of robotics into a new dimension, one in which motion and intelligence play equally important roles. The 2010 International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2010) was held in Shanghai, China, November 10–12, 2010. The theme of the c- ference was “Robotics Harmonizing Life,” a theme that reflects the ever-growing interest in research, development and applications in the dynamic and exciting areas of intelligent robotics. These volumes of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Artificial Intel- gence and Lecture Notes in Computer Science contain 140 high-quality papers, which were selected at least for the papers in general sessions, with a 62% acceptance rate Traditionally, ICIRA 2010 holds a series of plenary talks, and we were fortunate to have two such keynote speakers who shared their expertise with us in diverse topic areas spanning the rang of intelligent robotics and application activities.

Human Factors and Ergonomics have made a considerable contribution to the research, design, development, operation and analysis of transportation systems which includes road and rail vehicles and their complementary infrastructure, aviation and maritime transportation. This book presents recent advances in the Human Factors aspects of Transportation. These advances include accident analysis, automation of vehicles, comfort, distraction of drivers (understanding of distraction and how to avoid it), environmental concerns, in-vehicle systems design, intelligent transport systems, methodological developments, new systems and technology, observational and case studies, safety, situation awareness, skill development and training, warnings and workload. This book brings together the most recent human factors work in the transportation domain, including empirical research, human performance and other types of modeling, analysis, and development. The issues facing engineers, scientists, and other practitioners of human factors in transportation research are becoming more challenging and more critical. The common theme across these sections is that they deal with the intersection of the human and the system. Moreover, many of the chapter topics cross section boundaries, for instance by focusing on function allocation in NextGen or on the safety benefits of a tower controller tool. This is in keeping with the systemic nature of the problems facing human factors experts in rail and road, aviation and maritime research– it is becoming increasingly important to view problems not as isolated issues that can be extracted from the system environment, but as embedded issues that can only be understood as a part of an overall system.