**1. Introduction**

People with congenital and/or acquired disabilities constitute a great number of dependents in today's society. These patients lack enough autonomy to live an independent life. Robotic platforms for helping people with disabilities are being developed with the aim of providing both rehabilitation treatment and assistance in improving their quality of life, mainly for those who have mobility problems or some type of functional disability.

A high demand for services of assisted and rehabilitation robotic platforms is expected as a result of the health status of the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, according to the WHO (World Health Organization), existing rehabilitation services have been disrupted in 60–70% of countries due to this pandemic, because of the need to avoid human contact. Therefore, countries must face major challenges to ensure the health and autonomy of their disabled population. Robotic platforms are necessary to ensure assistance and rehabilitation for disabled people in the current global situation.

The capacity of robotic platforms in this area must be continuously improved in order to benefit the healthcare sector in aspects such as chronic disease prevention, assistance, and autonomy. For this reason, research about human–robot interaction in these robotic assistance environments must grow and advance because this topic demands sensitive and intelligent robotic platforms, equipped with complex sensory systems, high handling functionalities, safe control strategies, and intelligent computer vision algorithms. All these technological and scientific developments in different aspects of human–robot interaction can also be extended to other application areas (industry, agriculture, education, etc.) where the assistance of robots is crucial due to physically and/or psychologically demanding tasks.

This Special Issue of *Applied Sciences* called "Robotic Platforms for Assistance to People with Disabilities" has published seven papers which cover recent advances in the field of robotic platforms to assist disabled people in daily or clinical environments. The papers address innovative solutions in this field, including affordable assistive robotics devices, new techniques in control/computer vision for intelligent and safe human–robot interaction, and advances in mobile manipulators for assistive tasks. These papers represent significant contributions to the research field, which will be summarized in the next section.
