The fourth industrial revolution is deeply impacting nowadays manufacturing and production processes from all over the world. Robotics is demonstrating a key role in the current and future industry, exploiting advanced sensing, localization, grasping, motion control and AI technologies. These characteristics make the industrial robot a central system able to ensure the fulfilment of the main demands of the nowadays factories and to address highly specific tasks typical of small and medium-sized companies. The high flexibility and intelligence of a robot is guaranteed by its software, that is also highly responsible to extract the best possible and stable behaviour from the hardware on which it is deployed.