The ?eld of robotics continues to ?ourish and develop. In common with general scienti?c investigation, new ideas and implementations emerge quite spontaneously and these are discussed, used, discarded or subsumed at c- ferences, in the reference journals, as well as through the Internet. After a little more maturity has been acquired by the new concepts, then archival publication as a scienti?c or engineering monograph may occur. The goal of the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics is to publish new developments and advances in the ?elds of robotics research - rapidly and informally but with a high quality. It is hoped that prospective authors will welcome the opportunity to publish a structured presentation of some of the emerging robotics methodologies and technologies. The edited volume by Antonio Bicchi, Henrik Christensen and Domenico Prattichizzo is the outcome of the second edition of a workshop jointly sponsored by the IEEE Control Systems Society and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. Noticeably, the previous volume was published in the Springer Lecture Notes on Control and Information Sciences. The authors are recognised as leading scholars internationally. A n- ber of challenging control problems on the forefront of today's research in robotics and automation are covered, with special emphasis on vision, sensory-feedback control, human-centered robotics, manipulation, planning, ?exible and cooperative robots, assembly systems.

Inhalt

Path Optimization for Nonholonomic Systems: Application to Reactive Obstacle Avoidance and Path Planning.- From Dynamic Programming to RRTs: Algorithmic Design of Feasible Trajectories.- Control of Nonprehensile Manipulation.- Motion Planning and Control Problems for Underactuated Robots.- Motion Description Languages for Multi-Modal Control in Robotics.- Polynomial Design of Dynamics-based Information Processing System.- Actuation Methods For Human-Centered Robotics and Associated Control Challenges.- Control of a Flexible Manipulator with Noncollocated Feedback: Time Domain Passivity Approach.- Cartesian Compliant Control Strategies for Light-Weight, Flexible Joint Robots.- Toward the Control of Self-Assembling Systems.- Towards Abstraction and Control for Large Groups of Robots.- Omnidirectional Sensing for Robot Control.- A Passivity Approach to Vision-based Dynamic Control of Robots with Nonlinear Observer.- Visual Servoing Along Epipoles.- Toward Geometric Visual Servoing.- Vision-Based Online Trajectory Generation and Its Application to Catching.- Stability Analysis of Invariant Visual Servoing and Robustness to Parametric Uncertainties.