European Robotics Symposium 2008 (Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics)

These monothematic proceedings represent a collection of papers presented at the 2nd 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.