Editorial: “Physical human-robot interaction and co-manipulation: Mechatronics approaches”

The future robotics will be more and more closer to human in many applications such as in a future manufacturing, human rehabilitation, sport training and physical assistance, or medical and robotized surgery. Also, a domain of object co-manipulation jointly by human and robot is a very interesting and promising way of research. All these lead necessarily to a physical Human-Robot Interaction (commonly called pHRI) which brings new issues and challenges. Therefore, the classical approaches of robotic are not anymore suitable. The objective of this special issue is to collect articles that report the most recent accomplishments and results in the area of physical human-robot interaction and human-robot co-manipulation of objects.