This is a reprint of the articles from the Special Issue entitled "10th Anniversary of Actuators", published in the open-access journal, Actuators. It consists of 18 representative works with four main topics: systematic reviews for specific types of actuators, performance evaluation, design and controls, and new actuators' applications. This reprint helps readers to understand the challenges and the trends of research and development in advancing the theories, methodologies, and design tools of actuators.

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This Special Issue reviews advanced digital technologies in modelling and control of technological processes. The methods of numerical modelling, artificial intelligence, machine learning, automatic control, and optimization theory are considered in the published manuscripts of this Special Issue.

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The motivation for the present reprint is to provide an overview of novel applications of AI methods to industrial control systems by means of selected best practices in highlighting how such methodologies can be used to improve the production systems self-learning capacities, their overall performance, the related process and product quality, the optimal use of resources and the industrial systems safety, and resilience to varying boundary conditions and production requests. By means of its seven scientific contributions, the present reprint illustrates the increasing added value of the introduction of AI methods for improving the performance of control solutions with reference to different control and automation problems in different industrial applications and sectors, ranging from single manipulators or small unmanned ground vehicles up to complex manufacturing. Additionally, the role of AI to improve the performance of relevant engineering methodologies and digital instruments, such as cyberphysical systems, digital twins, and human–robot collaboration, are also effectively addressed in the included contributions.

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The main purpose of this Special Issue of “Advances in Fluid Power Systems” was to present new scientific work in the field of fluid power systems for hydraulic and pneumatic control of machines and devices used in various industries. Advances in fluid power systems are leading to the creation of new smart devices that can replace tried-and-true solutions from the past. The development work of authors from various research centres has been published. This Special Issue focuses on recent advances and smart solutions for fluid power systems in a wide range of topics, including: • Fluid power for IoT and Industry 4.0: smart fluid power technology, wireless 5G connectivity in fluid power, smart components, and sensors.• Fluid power in the renewable energy sector: hydraulic drivetrains for wind power and for wave and marine current power, and hydraulic systems for solar power. • Hybrid fluid power: hybrid transmissions, energy recovery and accumulation, and energy efficiency of hybrid drives.• Industrial and mobile fluid power: industrial fluid power solutions, mobile fluid power solutions, eand nergy efficiency solutions for fluid power systems.• Environmental aspects of fluid power: hydraulic water control technology, noise and vibration of fluid power components, safety, reliability, fault analysis, and diagnosis of fluid power systems.• Fluid power and mechatronic systems: servo-drive control systems, fluid power drives in manipulators and robots, and fluid power in autonomous solutions.

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This SI presents the latest achievements, challenges and prospects for drives, actuators, sensors, controls and robot navigation with reverse validation and applications in the field of industrial automation and robotics. Automation, supported by robotics, can effectively speed up and improve production. The industrialization of complex mechatronic components, especially robots, requires a large number of special processes already in the pre-production stage provided by modelling and simulation. This area of research from the very beginning includes drives, process technology, actuators, sensors, control systems and all connections in mechatronic systems. Automation and robotics form broad-spectrum areas of research, which are tightly interconnected. To reduce costs in the pre-production stage and to reduce production preparation time, it is necessary to solve complex tasks in the form of simulation with the use of standard software products and new technologies that allow, for example, machine vision and other imaging tools to examine new physical contexts, dependencies and connections.

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Energy storage can provide numerous beneficial services and cost savings within the electricity grid, especially when facing future challenges like renewable and electric vehicle (EV) integration. Public bodies, private companies and individuals are deploying storage facilities for several purposes, including arbitrage, grid support, renewable generation, and demand-side management. Storage deployment can therefore yield benefits like reduced frequency fluctuation, better asset utilisation and more predictable power profiles. Such uses of energy storage can reduce the cost of energy, reduce the strain on the grid, reduce the environmental impact of energy use, and prepare the network for future challenges.This Special Issue of Energies explore the latest developments in the control of energy storage in support of the wider energy network, and focus on the control of storage rather than the storage technology itself.

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The aim of this reprint is to present the current state of knowledge in the broad unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) discipline. With the rapid development of new applications and simulation methods, UAVs can now operate in a wide range of environmental conditions, thus extending the range of human activities due to their flexibility, autonomous control, size, low cost, and high adaptability. For this reason, the widely carried out multidisciplinary UAV research is of great importance in many fields. The intention of this collection was to bring together the work of leading researchers in the field of UAVs with an interest in their control, design, navigation, and autonomy. The papers included in this reprint present the key challenges of UAVs. The authors propose new solutions, approaches, and methodologies to address today's UAV challenges.

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The aim of this reprint is to present the current state of knowledge in the broad unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) discipline. With the rapid development of new applications and simulation methods, UAVs can now operate in a wide range of environmental conditions, thus extending the range of human activities due to their flexibility, autonomous control, size, low cost, and high adaptability. For this reason, the widely carried out multidisciplinary UAV research is of great importance in many fields. The intention of this collection was to bring together the work of leading researchers in the field of UAVs with an interest in their control, design, navigation, and autonomy. The papers included in this reprint present the key challenges of UAVs. The authors propose new solutions, approaches, and methodologies to address today's UAV challenges.

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This book contains all the articles published in the Special Issue "Dynamic Modeling and Simulation for Control Systems" from the MDPI Mathematics journal. This Special Issue aims to cover important aspects of how to optimize the dynamic behavior of physical systems using special algorithms and artificial intelligence in the modeling, simulation, and optimization of components and systems from important fields such as astronautics, aerospace, avionics, robotics, manufacturing systems, mechanical engineering, power energy, materials technology, and neurorehabilitation. It is our hope that this Special Issue will contribute to the research on techniques for the modeling, simulation, and optimization of control systems in dynamic systems.

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Robustly maintaining balance on two legs is an important challenge for humanoid robots. The work presented in this book represents a contribution to this area. It investigates efficient methods for the decision-making from internal sensors about whether and where to step, several improvements to efficient whole-body postural balancing methods, and proposes and evaluates a novel method for efficient recovery step generation, leveraging human examples and simulation-based reinforcement learning.

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The advantages offered by the flexible electronics and control systems technologies were utilized for tackling the challenges facing two crucial Magnetic Resonance (MR) applications. The first application is in the field of interventional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and the other application is in the field of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy (NMR).

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This book is a compilation of works covering applied mathematical methods and their applications in complex engineering problems. The methods covered in this book include modeling and simulation, computation, analysis, control, optimization, data science, and machine learning. The engineering application topics include but are not limited to environmental engineering, cybersecurity, transportation, agriculture, smart grid, and next-generation manufacturing.

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The efficient and intelligent management of energy resources is widely recognized as a key strategy for promoting environmental sustainability, equitable resource distribution, and enhanced resource reutilization. In modern energy systems, control and optimization techniques, and advanced algorithms in particular, play a pivotal role. Energy optimization is a critical concern across a broad spectrum of applications, including smart grids and microgrids, renewable energy systems, electric and hybrid vehicles, conventional engines, energy storage solutions, electric motors, and various types of traditional and non-traditional actuators. From large-scale infrastructure to small-scale components, all systems contribute significantly to the overall energy landscape. Even small actuators and motors, whether electric, hydraulic, or pneumatic, are integral to the vision of intelligent energy management due to their widespread use in energy-to-motion conversion processes. This Reprint aims to highlight recent advances in intelligent control strategies and optimization techniques focused on the efficient management of energy. The contributions within address systems in which algorithms and control methodologies play crucial roles in improving energy performance and optimization.

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This open access book provides a unified overview of topological obstructions to the stability and stabilization of dynamical systems defined on manifolds and an overview that is self-contained and accessible to the control-oriented graduate student. The authors review the interplay between the topology of an attractor, its domain of attraction, and the underlying manifold that is supposed to contain these sets. They present some proofs of known results in order to highlight assumptions and to develop extensions, and they provide new results showcasing the most effective methods to cope with these obstructions to stability and stabilization. Moreover, the book shows how Borsuk’s retraction theory and the index-theoretic methodology of Krasnosel’skii and Zabreiko underlie a large fraction of currently known results. This point of view reveals important open problems, and for that reason, this book is of interest to any researcher in control, dynamical systems, topology, or related fields.

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