Recent Advances in Robotics, Factory Automation and Intelligent Networked Systems

This Reprint brings together nine cutting-edge contributions (mainly extended papers from the 5th IFSA Winter Conference on Automation, Robotics & Communications for Industry 4.0/5.0 (ARCI' 2025)) addressing intelligent industrial systems, robotics, and machine learning applications for next-generation manufacturing. The articles cover advances in autonomous navigation for ground and aerial robots, social and collaborative human-robot interaction frameworks, and reinforcement-learning strategies for dual-arm assembly and dexterous manipulation in clutter. Further studies explore online anomaly detection at the edge, predictive-maintenance digital twins, privacy-preserving energy-prediction models, and emerging robotic applications in sports engineering. Together, these works highlight the rapid evolution of AI-driven automation and demonstrate how robotics, sensing, and data-centric methods are reshaping industrial environments toward safer, more adaptive, and more efficient operations.