As robots improve in efficiency and intelligence, there is a growing need to develop more efficient, accurate and powerful sensors in accordance with the tasks to be robotized. This has led to a great increase in the study and development of different kinds of sensor devices and perception systems over the last ten years. Applications that differ from the industrial ones are often more demanding in sensorics since the environment is not usually so well structured. Spatial and agricultural applications are examples of situations where the environment is unknown or variable. Therefore, the work to be done by a robot cannot be strictly programmed and there must be an interactive communication with the environment. It cannot be denied that evolution and development in robotics are closely related to the advances made in sensorics. The first vision and force sensors utilizing discrete components resulted in a very low resolution and poor accuracy. However, progress in VLSI, imaging devices and other technologies have led to the development of more efficient sensor and perception systems which are able to supply the necessary data to robots.

Inhalt
I. Force and torque sensors.- Joint force sensing for unified motor learning.- Modelling the interaction between robot and environment.- Pneumatic sensors: Their use and performance in force, tactile and position sensing and in shape recognition.- II. Tactile sensors.- Carbon fibre sensors.- Tactile geometry for images and normals.- A video speed tactile camera.- PANEL: Present and future of tactile sensors.- III. Acoustic sensors.- Acoustic range sensing for robotic control.- SONAIR ultrasonic range finders.- Ultrasonic imaging for industrial scene analysis.- Adaptive ultrasonic range finder for robotics.- IV. Optical sensors.- T. H. 7864 area array Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) image sensor with built-in antiblooming device.- Real time holes location. A step forward in bin picking tasks.- Combined 2-D and 3-D robot vision system.- The calibration problem for stereoscopic vision.- Non heuristic estimation of object shapes from partial information.- Parameter estimation in signal processing.- V. Other kinds of sensors.- Dynamic weighing in a pick-and-place environment.- Sensor fusion in certainty grids for mobile robots.- A six degrees of freedom positional deviation sensor for the teaching of robots.- VI. Applications.- Force feedback strategies and their application to assembly.- Application of laser range finder to robot vision.- Visual inspection system with qualitative analysis capabilities.- Predictive and estimation schemes in sensor-controlled telerobotics.- List of speakers.- List of participants.