A warm “welcome” from the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) to you to join us in the 2016 International Symposium on Flexible Automation, to be held during August 1 – 3, 2016 at the InterContinental Hotel near the CWRU campus in Cleveland, Ohio. The ISFA conference was initiated in 1986 under co-sponsorship of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the Institute of Systems, Control and Information Engineers (ISCIE) in Japan. Since then, the Symposium has been held every two years, and the title "Flexible Automation" was selected as a general term to describe automation technologies that are essential to meeting the increasing requirements of modern manufacturing and other related fields, such as dynamical systems, robotics, logistics, biomedical systems, and health care systems. While many of these requirements such as flexibility, artificial intelligence, mechatronics, 3D design and modeling, lead time reduction, and lean manufacturing, were identified over more than three decades ago, they still pose challenges and continue to motivate research in the field. In addition, newly emerged ideas and technologies, such as unmanned vehicle control, Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and manufacturing, additive manufacturing, image processing and pattern recognition, cyber-physical systems, security, and environmental sustainability present both new challenges and opportunities that broaden the scope of research and impact the continued advancement of flexible automation. The theme of the ISFA 2016 conference is "Flexible Automation: Smart and Connected” and aims to inspire research on energy-efficient and intelligent automation, enhanced by the cloud infrastructure.