Robotic technologies have revolutionized medical procedures over the past few decades. The field of medical robotic devices is expanding rapidly; this technology can help patients rehabilitate from diseases and accidents, improving the quality of daily life and helping with a variety of routine service tasks. Many assistive and therapeutic operations can be done by rehabilitation robots and surgical robots, reducing overloading and enhancing the efficiency of medical treatment and nursing.

However, the deployment and integration of robots in the medical operation has been hampered by issues such as limited sensory perception, safety concerns, situational awareness for the human user, and having to operate in unfamiliar environments such as the home or the operating theatre. The development and design of novel control strategies is required to solve these challenges. By linking clinical requirements with the capabilities of state-of-the-art robotic technologies, researchers, industry engineers, and scientists of different backgrounds can come up with solutions for designing control strategies and control software implementation for medical robot applications.

This Special Issue is devoted to collecting state-of-the-art developments and research outcomes addressing the related theoretical and practical aspects regarding advanced control and applications in a wide range of medical robots. The aim is to provide a platform for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss innovative solutions. Original research and review articles are both welcome.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Dynamics models and dynamics-based controller design for medical robots
• Stability, disturbance rejection, and robustness in clinical applications
• Cooperative or semi-autonomous control of medical robots
• Advanced biomedical signal processing
• Human-computer interaction for biomedical applications
• Multi-modal based bio-signal processing and pattern recognition
• Intelligent wearable and assistive medical devices
• Advanced control algorithms for medical robot control