Introduction to the special issue on Advances in intelligent nonlinear control for robotic systems

In the last two decades, robotic systems have achieved wide applications in every aspect of human society, including industrial manufacturing, automotive production, medical devices, and social lives. With the diversity of application do-mains, control techniques have pervaded from industrial robot manipulators, wheeled or legged mobile robots, unmanned autonomous aerial, ground, and underwater vehicles, to humanoid robots, and haptic devices, etc. The growing number of applications of robotics and increasing requirements for system stability, reliability, and safety, are posing new and challenging theoretical and technological problems for modeling and control of these highly nonlinear systems. Control of these complex systems is highly challenging due to the inherent nonlinear response and strong heterogeneity in dif-ferent parts as computers, sensors, hardware objects, etc. As such, novel nonlinear control strategies are essential to the advancement of robotic systems and corresponding technologies.