The International Symposium on Flexible Automation (ISFA) was initiated in 1986 under the co-sponsorship of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the Institute of Systems, Control and Information Engineers (ISCIE) in Japan, and has been held biennially since then. The “Flexible Automation” in the name was selected as a general term to describe automation technologies that are essential to meet the increasing requirements of modern manufacturing and other related fields, such as dynamical systems, robotics, logistics, biomedical systems, and healthcare systems.

While many of these requirements, such as flexibility, artificial intelligence, mechatronics, 3D design and modeling, lead time reduction, and lean manufacturing, have been identified over the past thirty-plus years, they still pose challenges and continue to motivate research in the field. In addition, newly emerging ideas and technologies, such as unmanned vehicle control, the Internet of Things (IoT), direct human-robot collaboration, cloud computing and manufacturing, additive manufacturing, image processing and pattern recognition, cyber-physical systems, security, environmental sustainability, and big data analysis, present both new challenges and opportunities that broaden the scope of research and have impacts on the continued advancement of flexible automation.