Editorial: Advanced Control Methods in Marine Robotics Applications

This article collection aims to provide a set of reports that could be used to better understand the state of the art and trigger a wide-range discussion among researchers and practitioners active in marine robotics and researchers active in robotics applications of control theory and engineering. This research topic originated from the workshop “Hand-Shaking Advanced Control in Marine Robotics Applications” held at IROS 2018. However, contributions have been collected through an open call. As a result, we have a diverse set of contributions in which authors deal with current challenges in marine robotics; in particular issues and solutions related to control problems for systems interacting with the environment, advanced control of systems with uncertain dynamics working within uncertain environments, classical control with prioritized tasks for object avoidance, cooperative motion coordination, biomimetic approaches to formation control, etc. We did not receive submissions on more research-oriented topics like “embodiment,” “morphological computation,” “orchestration control,” “self-organization of behaviors in soft robots,” and “persistent autonomy,” nor on “human–robot interaction”; this is an interesting fact by itself.