https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-017-0758-4 GUEST EDITORIAL Mechatronic and Embedded Systems for Robotics and Mobile Machines Massimo Callegari 1 · Primo Zingaretti 2 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2017 The term “mechatronics” was originally created by Tetsuro Mori, an engineer of Yaskawa Electric Corporation, who also registered it as a trademark in 1971. When it was released for public use, it was quickly adopted by the German automotive industry but soon spread all over the world. The word “mechatronics” blends the terms “mechanics” and “electronics” but in a holistic view it represents more that the mere combination of such technological fields, since it also integrates control theory and computer science within product design and manufacturing. Of course robotics was since the origin the most important and visible instance of such concept, so that “mechatronics” and “robotics” are often considered synonymous. It is therefore well deserved the place that MESA, the well-known IEEE/ASME International Conference on Mechatronic and Embedded Systems and Applications, traditionally leaves for the Symposium on Robotics and Mobile Machines and it is for us an honour to have the opportunity to collect the best robotics papers of the Conference in a highly-reputed venue as the Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems. The goal of this special issue is to contribute to research in this field by presenting to a wider audience the latest results reached by a selected group of top researchers and scientists of different geographic regions and scientific interests. To this aim we have asked some researchers that presented their work at the 12th IEEE/ASME MESA International Conference held in Auckland (New Zealand) in August 2016 to prepare an extended version of their  Primo Zingaretti p.zingaretti@univpm.it Massimo Callegari m.callegari@univpm.it 1 Department of Industrial Engineering & Mathematical Sciences, Universit` a Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy 2 Department of Information Engineering, Universit` a Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy papers that contained the new results obtained in the meantime. Thirteen papers have been invited and ten manuscripts have been received and reviewed by at least three international reviewers with expertise in the specific field; after a two-stage reviewing process, six articles have been finally retained and collected in the present special issue. The main topics addressed by these papers are: design of robots for rehabilitation, dextrous robotics grippers and wrists, bio-inspired underwater robotics, human-robot collaboration, robotic vision. Jonathan D Realmuto et al. study the collaborative human-robot output tracking when the desired output is only known to the human but not to the robot controller: they propose an iterative learning algorithm that updates the robot input by putting the human action in the loop. Matteo-Claudio Palpacelli et al. developed an error kinematic model of a mini spherical robot, aimed at its kinematic calibration: they analysed their model by means of computer simulation and showed by several experiments that a reduced-order model provides results almost as good as the full model. Marina Paolanti et al. describe an intelligent mecha- tronic system for indoor navigation assistance in retail environments that minimizes the need for active tagging and does not require metrics maps. The tracking system is based on ultra-wideband technology and the paper con- tributes a novel Hidden Markov Model for the representa- tion of shoppers’ shelf/category attraction and usual retail scenarios. Mingming Zhang et al. describe the use of a compliant ankle rehabilitation robot for the treatment of drop foot. The robot has a bio-inspired design by employing four fluidic muscles that mimic skeletal muscles actuating three rotational degrees of freedom. A trajectory tracking controller was developed in joint task space to track the predefined trajectory of the end effector by commanding the individual muscles’ length based on inverse kinematics. The preliminary tests performed on three patients with drop Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems (2018) 91:135–136 Published online: 13 December 2017