European Robotics Symposium 2008

At the dawn of the new millennium, robotics is undergoing a major transformation in scope and dimension. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics is rapidly expanding into the challenges of unstructured environments. Interacting with, assi- ing, serving, and exploring with humans, the emerging robots will increasingly touch people and their lives. The goal of the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR) series is to bring, in a timely fashion, the latest advances and developments in robotics on the basis of their significance and quality. It is our hope that the wider dissemination of research - velopments will stimulate more exchanges and collaborations among the research community and contribute to further advancement of this rapidly growing field. The European Robotics Symposium (EUROS) was launched in 2006 as an inter- tional scientific single-track event promoted by EURON, the European Robotics Network linking most of the European research teams since its inception in 2000. Since then, EUROS has found its parental home under STAR, together with the other thematic symposia devoted to excellence in robotics research: FSR, ISER, ISRR, WAFR.

These monothematic proceedings represent a collection of papers presented at the 2^nd European Robotics Symposium, held in Prague, March 26-27, 2008. The goal of the given selection of papers is to provide a comprehensive overview of the recent status in robotics research world-wide in the key areas of cognition, autonomy, adaptation and robustness in robotics. Special attention is paid to topics integrating classical robotics, computer science and artificial intelligence techniques with the ultimate goal to create real-world autonomous systems. This book also serves as an arena to show and compare different approaches to solution of open core problems in intelligent robotics – building autonomous robots that do only not co-exist with human entities but also cooperate and coordinate their activities with humans. If this is achieved, a deep penetration of self-contained and autonomous robots into real life becomes inevitable.

Therefore, the contributions presented herein reflect the most interesting topics of current days and comprise an introduction of novel methods and tools resolving robotics-related problems in sensing and navigation, localization and mapping, cooperation and coordination of multi-robot systems as well as issues of human-robot interaction and applications.