ROBOTICS: SCIENCE AND SYSTEMS IV

State-of-the-art robotics research on such topics as manipulation, motion planning, micro-robotics, distributed systems, autonomous navigation, and mapping.

Robotics: Science and Systems IV spans a wide spectrum of robotics, bringing together researchers working on the foundations of robotics, robotics applications, and analysis of robotics systems. This volume presents the proceedings of the fourth annual Robotics: Science and Systems conference, held in 2008 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. The papers presented cover a range of topics, including computer vision, mapping, terrain identification, distributed systems, localization, manipulation, collision avoidance, multibody dynamics, obstacle detection, microrobotic systems, pursuit-evasion, grasping and manipulation, tracking, spatial kinematics, machine learning, and sensor networks as well as such applications as autonomous driving and design of manipulators for use in functional-MRI. The conference and its proceedings reflect not only the tremendous growth of robotics as a discipline but also the desire in the robotics community for a flagship event at which the best of the research in the field can be presented.

Oliver Brock is Alexander von Humboldt Professor at Technische Universitä t Berlin.

Jeff Trinkle is Professor of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Fabio Ramos is ARC Research Fellow at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney.