Special Issue on Robots and the Work Environment

The future development of industries is currently on the agenda of public and scientific debates. Due to new technical options such as artificial intelligence and robots, sensor networks, big data, etc., which are “captured in terms such as the Internet of Things and the Internet of Robotic Things” according to van Est and Kools [1], visions like Industry 4.0 in Germany, the Future d’Industrie in France, or Made in China 2015 in China are focusing on “new” models of industries. These visions are quite promising and are putting their emphasis (at least in Germany) on a fourth technical revolution with strong effects on social and economic processes all over the world [2]. Stemming from these technical developments, some studies have prominently launched some hypotheses about a dramatic increase of job losses in the industry in the near future [3–5]. One important aspect of this debate refers to the questions about whether increasing automation and robotization lead to the replacement of labor whereas at the same time productivity growth is expected and accomplished. As the long history of industrial developments shows, “there are grounds for assuming that automation and robotization will, as a result of second-order effects, in turn leads to new jobs” [1]. The debate shows, however, that the “side effects” of robotization are complex and that they should be strongly connected with future models of organizational, social, and political models of labor in current societies. These models should be broadly negotiated in stakeholder processes involving unions, politicians, scientists, as well as economists. However, the debate also shows that there is little knowledge about the real and the current effects of automation and robotization in industry and services. As described above, technical innovations are offering visible impulses with regard to new forms of automation processes. This does not seem to be something innovative in the industry. From the very beginning, the industrial sector has been automated and robotized with regard to a rationalization of work. However, it seems that these new robotization processes (should) open up a new era in industry. Therefore, we, the editors, found it extremely worthy to collect and analyze scientific knowledge and empirical evidences about Robots and the Work Environment in current societies. In the call for papers we stated that industrial, service, and social robots are intended as significant “partners” or “co-workers” in human working environments, as several authors already considered in their research [6–8]. The increasing expectation to implement robots in manifold working processes is expressed not only by public debates but also by the orientation of national and international policy strategies [9–11]. Therefore, we invited theoretical and empirical papers and case studies that critically look into the areas of human-robot interaction in work environments and the impact of robots on the work environment. Within the area of human-robot interaction, we asked for the analysis of the potential impact in different work environments. We were also interested in how the application of robots is changing the character of work in specific fields, how it offers new developments as well as a new phase of automation, and how the anthropocentric dimension of human-machine interfaces is changing. Furthermore, we asked for the long-term perspective of organizational, social, and ethical implications. Thus, the following Special Issue on “Robots and the Work Environment” offers different