Nowadays, robotics has experienced a noticeable growth mainly due to the successful partnership between theory and practice, whose alliance distinguishes the modern robotics from the early robotics. This progress is the result of the interplay between the engineering and scientific communities of different disciplines. In this sense, control engineering plays a major role not only in the development of new robotic systems, but also in the performance improvement of existing and traditional robotic systems. The control of robots can be considered as the cornerstone of robotics. Its task consists of making a robot do what it is desired to do in an autonomous way.

The aim of this special issue is to collect the more recent original works of the automatic control community, achieved in control of robotic systems such as mobile robots, underwater and flying robots, industrial robots, surgical robots, legged robots, space robots, robot manipulators, cooperative manipulators, networked robots, and multiagent systems.

Advanced methods of control are required in order to adequately face challenging problems arisen from underactuation, visual servoing, visual tracking, teleoperation, locomotion, coordination, cooperative manipulation, flocking and swarming, performance improvement, among others. Theoretical, numerical, and experimental contributions of original research will receive full consideration.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Energy/passivity based control
• Nonlinear, robust, and adaptive control
• Intelligent and learning control
• Fractional-order stabilization
• Zero gravity robotics
• Classical control and other fundamental control techniques