Experimental Robotics VI [Paperback]

This book presents the proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics held in Sydney in March 1999. The editors and contributors represent the leading robotics research efforts from around the world. Micro-machines, interplanetary exploration, minimally invasive surgery and emerging humanoid robots are among the most obvious attainments of leading robotics research teams reported in this volume. Less obvious but equally significant are the fundamental advances in robot map-building and methods of communication between humans and machines that are demonstrated through experimental results. This collection of papers will provide the reader with a concise report on the current achievements and future trends in robotics research across the world.From insects to robots.- Control and coordination of multiple mobile robots in manipulation and material handling tasks.- Experiments in constrained prehensile manipulation: Distributed manipulation with ropes.- Experiments with desktop mobile manipulators.- Experimental approach on grasping and manipulating multiple objects.- Preliminary results on the use of stereo, color cameras and laser sensors in antarctica.- Sensors for the object detection in environments with high heat radiation and photoresist or diffuse visibility conditions.- New techniques for 3D modeling ... ... and for doing without.- A mobile robot navigation by means of range data from ultra wide angle laser sensor and simple linguistic behavior instructions.- Explicit incorporation of 2D constraints in vision based control of robot manipulators.- Experiments with medium-level intelligent force control.- Coordinated manipulation under distributed impedance control.- Experiments and factory application of force control and contour following over visco-elastic surface.- Coordinated control of a nonholonomic mobile manipulator.- Exploiting redundancy for autonomous calibration of a planar robot.- Models for automated earthmoving.- Robot conlí