In Celebration of the Foundation of “International Journal of Automation Technology”

It is my great honor to extend my sincere congratulation on the new journal on automation technology in 21st century. The assembly automation started in the 1960's after machining had been mechanized. It took a long period to mechanize workers’ operation and automate assembly lines. In these decades, computers exploded their ability and robots gained intelligence. The diversification of the customer requirement, however, has changed automated lines into manufacturing systems with low flexibility. Instead of automation, cell manufacturing system by human workers turned dominant. Hereafter, the automation will become important again. A new age of automation comes with intelligent use of sensors; technology of image processing an force feedback enables automatic machine not only adaptable to the change of environment but also cooperative with human workers. Applications of automation technology will extend from manufacturing industries to service sectors, where IRT (Information and Robot Technology) is required to support to deal with physical objects and to generate values for each individual. I hope the journal advances automation technology in various novel fields such as bio-engineering, human support technology and service engineering.