Production & Manufacturing Research

Humans and Robots in Factories of the Future

Departing from concepts compartmentalising full automation, human-initiated operation, or narrow sets of human–machine interrelations, today’s production science turns to more differentiated views where involvement of humans and machines spans a finer spectrum. New prospects—also of practical impact—open up with progress in artificial intelligence and growing insight into human cognition and behaviour, team coordination and collaboration dynamics, or advanced techniques operating on large process and design datasets. These advances transform our current understanding of the interplay of human and artificial resources in industrial production, giving the concept of socio-cyber-physical production systems—often labelled “Industry 5.0”—more substance, and more specific topics to elaborate.

Theory and practice of industrial production are anticipating profound changes when it comes to a productive, safe and fulfilling interlinking of humans and robots in production systems. The path of this evolution is, however, hardly possible to foresee: it unfolds gradually as new insight and achievements emerge. Therefore, it is vital for experts, stakeholders and users to exchange views and findings, (re-)establish common ground in key aspects, and set landmarks as commonly recognised points of reference. The article collection is intended to provide a platform to this end, facilitating exchange between authors representing the many contributing domains.

The Article Collection welcomes submissions within the following scope:

• Human–robot interrelations: co-location, concurrency, cooperation, collaboration, interaction. Trends, concerns, impact on production systems.
• Robotic awareness and integrity in future production systems: sensing, learning, models, world-views, transactions and policies, cognitive industrial robotics.
• Trends and dynamics of mixed human–machine production systems: decision horizons, human and robot rationality, autonomy, emergent phenomena, evolving human and robotic capabilities.
• Artificial intelligence in production systems: distributed intelligence, generative AI and industrial foundation models, human–machine co-intelligence.
• Mastering uncertainty, ambiguity, stochastic and semi-structured characteristics of shared production environments.
• Mastering the unexpected: exception handling, process and value recovery, improving by experience.
• Application design across the human–robot spectrum: resource allocation planning, dynamic task scheduling; innovative applications and design methodologies; advanced risk assessment methods; Decision making models ad techniques.
• Human-centred collaborative robotics: safety, ergonomics, and wellbeing in H–R teams and production environments; adaptive robotic behaviour; human sensing and modelling for advanced HRI; ethical industrial robotics.
• Preparing future generations for future work environments: robots in engineering education, vocational training as well as learning factories.

Keywords: Socio-cyber-physical production systems; Human–robot interrelations; Autonomy; Teamwork; Learning factories

All manuscripts submitted to this Article Collection will undergo a full peer-review; the Guest Advisor for this Collection will not be handling the manuscripts (unless they are an Editorial Board member).

Please review the journal scope and author submission instructions prior to submitting a manuscript.

The deadline for submitting manuscripts is [31 December, 2026].

Please contact [Zhan Yu] at [[email protected]] with any queries and discount codes regarding this Article Collection.

Please be sure to select “Humans and Robots in Factories of the Future” from the drop-down menu in the submission system.

Dr. Luca Gualtieri is a tenure-track assistant professor at the Faculty of Engineering of the Free University of Bolzano, as well as deputy head of the “Smart Mini Factory laboratory” (SMF) for Industry 4.0/5.0 and senior researcher at the “Extended Reality Laboratory and Training Center” (XR-lab). He is responsible for research in the field of human-centred manufacturing, ergonomics and safety in advanced industrial human–robot interaction, assistance systems for training and production, and technology-based social inclusion of vulnerable workers in manufacturing contexts. He participated as PI and collaborator in many national and European-funded project calls, as well as collaboration with private companies in industrial projects. He taught several industrial and academic lectures on the mentioned topics. He is part of the TPMR journal editorial board.

Dr. Zsolt Kemény is a Senior Researcher at HUN-REN SZTAKI (Hungarian Research Network, Institute for Computer Science and Control). He received both his MSc in computer science and PhD at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), in 1998 and 2004, respectively. He has experience in robotics and cyber-physical systems, as well as embedded computing, and identity-based tracking and tracing. He also holds mechatronics lectures at BME, is one of the key personnel operating the learning factories on SZTAKI’s premises, and is leading the Advanced Robotics Working Group in the International Association of Learning Factories. Author or co-author of 85 publications, with over 730 independent citations.

Dr. József Váncza is Chief Advisor, formerly Head of the Laboratory for Engineering and Management Intelligence, at HUN-REN SZTAKI, Budapest, Hungary. His research interests include engineering applications of artificial intelligence, production informatics, cyber-physical manufacturing systems, human-robot collaboration, cooperative and sustainable production in networks. He was awarded among others with the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic, Knight Cross (2008), the Dennis Gábor Prize for Innovation (2021) and the Rudolf Kálmán Prize (2025). He has been active in university education for three decades and is now an Honorary Professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME). He is a Fellow of the International Academy for Production Engineering (CIRP) and the International Academy of Engineering and Technology (AET), and serves on the editorial boards of several leading engineering journals (also as chair or associate editor). For his 230+ publications he received 6900+ citations.