THE idea of the fourth industrial revolution, which was coined from that of “Industry 4.0” mainly for the manufacturing field, was first introduced with great expectations to have substantial impact on all industrial areas in the future and bring massive changes in all our lives at the world economy forum in Davos 2016. The concept of the fourth industrial revolution has drawn attention throughout the world and many efforts to define the concept in diverse fields have continued. Generally, the concept can be summarized as the technology convergence through hyper-intelligence and hyper-connectivity. The core technologies providing the thrust of the fourth industrial revolution, especially in the industrial informatics field, are Internet of Things, robotics, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. As one of the most critical characteristics of the fourth industrial revolution technology is that the boundary between cyber space and physical space becomes unclear, innovations in industry and business initiate through the fusion of these two spaces. It is the robotic system that plays the key role as a physical medium linking cyber and physical spaces and even changing the physical space through direct interactions. In this sense, robotic system should be recognized as a crucial platform in performing tasks in the cyber-physical space. Acknowledging the fact that much latest advancement with core robotic technologies are not being recognized widely, while they have been contributing to the initiation of the fourth industrial revolution, we Guest Editors have come to a fruition to introduce some of the noticeable work through this special section. A total of 33 papers were submitted, of which eight outstanding papers were selected to be published. The paper topic can be categorized into two fields: autonomous system and control and perception and human–robot interaction (HRI). 1) Autonomous Robot System and Control: Four articles, selected for the autonomous system and control field, present the work related to autonomous unmanned vehicles within various environments and the software architecture that controls a platoon of vehicles. The first paper in this area is “Designing Dynamic and Collaborative Automation and Robotics Software Systems” by Salcic et al. This paper elaborates upon those challenges and proposes using an approach called service-oriented SystemJ, based on the system-level programming language SystemJ enhanced with service-oriented features.