Advanced Robotics Advanced robotics systems are ready to transform industrial operations. Compared with conventional robots, advanced robots have a superior perception, integrability, adaptability, and mobility. These improvements permit faster setup, commissioning, and reconfiguration, as well as more efficient and stable operations. The cost of this sophisticated equipment will decline as prices for sensors and computing power decrease, and as software increasingly replaces hardware as the primary driver of functionality. Taken together, these improvements mean that advanced robots will be able to perform many tasks more economically than the previous generation of automated systems. Most producers recognize that advanced robotic systems will play an important role in the factory of the future, and they are optimistic about the potential to increase the use of these systems. They maintain this positive outlook despite dissatisfaction with their current progress toward implementa...