Intelligent robots will soon be ready to serve in our home, hospital, office, and outdoors. One key approach to the development of such intelligent and autonomous robots draws inspiration from behavior demonstration of biological systems. In fact, using this approach, a number of new application areas have recently received significant interests in the robotics community, including rehabilitation robots, service robots, medical robots, and entertainment robots.

It is clear that bioinspired methods are becoming increasingly important in the face of the complexity of today’s demanding applications. Biological inspiration in robotics is leading to complex structures with sensory-motor coordination, in which learning often plays an important role in achieving adaptation. In addition, rehabilitation robotics has produced exciting new ideas and novel human assistive devices in the growing field of biomedical robotics. The science and technology of rehabilitation robotics will progress through the collaboration among robotic researchers, medical doctors, and patients.

This special issue will focus on the theoretical and technological challenges of evolutionary transformation from biological systems to intelligent robots and the most recent advances in modeling, design, analysis, implementation, and therapeutic testing of the human assistive rehabilitation robotics. All aspects of biologically inspired robots and rehabilitation robotics are welcome.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Robotics, mobile robots, aerial robots, and underwater robots
• Biomimetics, biologically inspired robots, climbing robots, snake robots, and walking robots
• Biomedical and rehabilitation engineering, and medical robotics
• Automation, control systems, simulation techniques, and control applications
• Sensor design, multisensor data fusion, and wireless sensor networks
• Computer vision and image processing
• MEMS, nanotechnology, NEMS, and micro-/nanosystems
• Multirobot systems and distributed robotics