Guest editorial: focused section on human‑centered robotics

Next generation of industrial revolution will be featured with broad applications of intelligent technologies; among those popular ones are intelligent manufacturing and autonomous products like vehicles and robotic systems. In both cases, autonomous operations are at the center of the stage, in which appropriate sensing and perception play critical roles. Indeed, recent advances in sensing and perception technologies have produced exciting new ideas in facilitating autonomous manufacturing and/or robotic vehicular systems. These technologies will potentially evolve with more and more ‘smart functions’ and move manufacturing and robotic systems from single structured operation to sensing/perception-based self-governed yet collaborative multi-system operations. This Focused Section is dedicated to new progresses in modeling, design, control, communication, and implementation of sensing and perception systems for autonomous and/or networked robotics, and intends to provide the state-of-the-art update of research fronts. The Focused Section consists of six research papers covering detection of human motion (Jiang, et al), vision based pose measurement (Zhang, et al,), ream-time object detection and tracking (Benabderrahmane), 3-D map reconstruction (Turan, et al; Landsiedel and Wollherr), and vision based endoscopic capsule robot (Turan, et al).