Robotics Research

Robotics is undergoing a major transformation in scope and dimension. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics is rapidly expanding into human environments and vigorously engaged in its new challenges. Interacting with, assisting, serving, and exploring with humans, the emerging robots will increasingly touch people and their lives. The Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR) is devoted to bringing to the research community the latest advances in the robotics field on the basis of their significance and quality. Through a wide and timely dis semination of critical research developments in robotics, our objective with this series is to promote more exchanges and collaborations among the re searchers in the community and contribute to further advancements in this rapidly growing field. As one of robotics pioneering symposia, the International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR) has established over the past two decades some of the fields most fundamental and lasting contributions. Since the launching of STAR, ISRR and several other thematic symposia in robotics find an important platform for closer links and extended reach within the robotics community. This twelfth edition of Robotics Research, edited by Sebastian Thrun, Rodney Brooks, and Hugh Durrant-Whyte, offers in its 14-part volume a collection of a broad range of topics in robotics. The content of these contributions provides a wide coverage of the current state of robotics research: the advances and challenges in its theoretical foundation and technology basis, and the developments in its traditional and novel areas of apphcations.

Post-conference proceedings of the 12th International Symposium ISRR held at October 12-15 2005 in San Francisco

Physical Human Robot Interaction and Haptics.- Session Overview Physical Human-Robot Integration and Haptics.- A Unified Passivity Based Control Framework for Position, Torque and Impedance Control of Flexible Joint Robots.- Wave Haptics: Encoderless Virtual Stiffnesses.- Reality-Based Estimation of Needle and Soft-Tissue Interaction for Accurate Haptic Feedback in Prostate Brachytherapy Simulation.- Haptic Virtual Fixtures for Robot-Assisted Manipulation.- Planning.- Session Overview Planning.- POMDP Planning for Robust Robot Control.- On the Probabilistic Foundations of Probabilistic Roadmap Planning.- Humanoids.- Session Overview Humanoids.- Humanoid HRP2-DHRC for Autonomous and Interactive Behavior.- Android Science.- Mimetic Communication Theory for Humanoid Robots Interacting with Humans.- Mechanism and Design.- Session Overview Mechanisms and Design.- Design of a Compact 6-DOF Haptic Device to Use Parallel Mechanisms.- Hybrid Nanorobotic Approaches to NEMS.- Jacobian, Manipulability, Condition Number and Accuracy of Parallel Robots.- SLAM.- Session Overview Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping.- Subjective Localization with Action Respecting Embedding.- D-SLAM: Decoupled Localization and Mapping for Autonomous Robots.- A Provably Consistent Method for Imposing Sparsity in Feature-Based SLAM Information Filters.- Field Robots.- Session Overview Field Robotics.- Field D*: An Interpolation-Based Path Planner and Replanner.- Tradeoffs Between Directed and Autonomous Driving on the Mars Exploration Rovers.- Surface Mining: Main Research Issues for Autonomous Operations.- Robotic Vision.- Session Overview Robotic Vision.- Bias Reduction and Filter Convergence for Long Range Stereo.- Fusion of Stereo, Colour and Contrast.- Automatic Single-Image 3d Reconstructions of Indoor Manhattan World Scenes.- Robot Design and Control.- Session Overview Robot Design and Control.- One Is Enough!.- A Steerable, Untethered, 250 × 60 µm MEMS Mobile Micro-Robot.- Some Issues in Humanoid Robot Design.- That Which Does Not Stabilize, Will Only Make Us Stronger.- Underwater Robotics.- Session Overview Underwater Robotics.- Improved Estimation of Target Velocity Using Multiple Model Estimation and a Dynamic Bayesian Network for a Robotic Tracker of Ocean Animals.- Techniques for Deep Sea Near Bottom Survey Using an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle.- Advances in High Resolution Imaging from Underwater Vehicles.- Learning and Adaptive Behavior.- Session Overview Learning and Adaptive Behavior.- Using AdaBoost for Place Labeling and Topological Map Building.- Emergence, Exploration and Learning of Embodied Behavior.- Hierarchical Conditional Random Fields for GPS-Based Activity Recognition.- Networked Robotics.- Session Overview Networked Robotics.- Networked Robotic Cameras for Collaborative Observation of Natural Environments.- Interfaces and Interaction.- Session Overview Interfaces and Interaction.- Haptic Communication Between Humans and Robots.- A Vestibular Interface for Natural Control of Steering in the Locomotion of Robotic Artifacts: Preliminary Experiments.- How Social Robots Will Help Us to Diagnose, Treat, and Understand Autism.- Invited Overview Talk.- Expo 2005 Robotics Project.- Robotics Science (Panel Discussion).- Position Statement: Robotics Science.