This book presents a comprehensive guide to the design of playing robots and the related play experiences. Play is a natural activity for building and improving abilities, and it reveals important particularly for persons with disabilities. Many social, physical and cultural factors may hinder children with disabilities from fully enjoying play as their peers. Autonomous robots with specific characteristics can enhance the ludic experience, having implications for the character of the play and presenting opportunities related to autonomy and physical movement, the very nature of robots. Their introduction into play thus provides everybody, and in particular persons with disabilities, new possibilities for developing abilities, improving general status, participating in social contexts, as well as supporting professionals in monitoring progress. This book presents a framework for the design of playful activities with robots, developed over 20 years' experience at AIRLab - POLIMI. Part 1 introduces the play concepts and characteristics, and research results about play of children with different kinds of impairments. Part 2 focuses on implementing robots able to play. The design of playful activities is discussed, as well as the necessary characteristics for them to be useful in both general play and activities involving disability-related limitations. In Part 3, the defined framework is used to analyze possibilities involving robots available on the toy market, robots developed at research labs, and robots to be developed in the next future. The aim of the book is to give developers, caregivers, and users a set of methodological tools for selecting, exploring, and designing inclusive play activities where robots play a central role.

RoboCup 2003, the 7th Robot World Cup Soccer and Rescue Competitions and Conferences, was held at PadovaFiere, in Padua, Italy during July 2-11, 2003. Following the trend established in recent years, the competition continued to grow, with 244 teams from 30 countries making up the 1244 participants. These teams were distributed across di?erent leagues, where each league conducted one or more competitions. The league reports contained in this book summarize the scienti?c advancements made in each league as well as the results of the competition. Additionally, the supplementalCDcoupledwiththis bookcontains theTeamDescriptionPapersforeachteamcompetinginRoboCup. Theleagues, in alphabetical order, were: - RoboCup Humanoid League - RoboCup Junior League soccer, rescue, and dance competition - RoboCup Legged League - RoboCup Middle-Size League - RoboCup Rescue Real Robot League - RoboCup Rescue Simulation League - RoboCup Simulation League soccer, coach, and visualization competition - RoboCup Small-Size League This bookbeginswith anoverviewoverthe RoboCupcompetition together with a vision statement for the future development of RoboCup until 2050 and three invited papers by internationally leading researchers of the robotics ?eld. The core part of the book contains papers accepted for oral or poster presentation at the International RoboCup Symposium 2003, which was held directly after the RoboCup competitions. The RoboCup team descriptions which, traditionally, have been part of the proceedings are now provided on a supplementary CD. This enabled us to allocate signi?cantly more space for the fast-growing number of participating teams, thus rendering the team descriptions more informative and thus valuable

The papers collected in this book are concerned with the application of the so-called "soft-computing" techniques to the aim of defining flexible systems. The topics covered witness the actual research trend towards an integration of distinct formal techniques for defining flexible systems. The contributions in this volume mainly concern the definition of systems in several application fields, such as image processing, control, asset allocation, medicine, time series forecasting, qualitative modeling, support to design, reliability analysis, diagnosis, filtering, data analysis, land mines detection and so forth. The papers presented in this volume are organized into three main thematic sections: Fuzzy Systems, Neural Networks and Genetic and Evolutionary Algorithms, although, as outlined before, some works employ more than one technique from these fields.