This book offers a comprehensive, timely snapshot of current research, technologies and applications of soft robotics. The different chapters, written by international experts across multiple fields of soft robotics, cover innovative systems and technologies for soft robot legged locomotion, soft robot manipulation, underwater soft robotics, biomimetic soft robotic platforms, plant-inspired soft robots, flying soft robots, soft robotics in surgery, as well as methods for their modeling and control. Based on the results of the second edition of the Soft Robotics Week, held on April 25 - 30, 2016, in Livorno, Italy, the book reports on the major research lines and novel technologies presented and discussed during the event.

This book offers a comprehensive, timely snapshot of current research, technologies and applications of soft robotics. The different chapters, written by international experts across multiple fields of soft robotics, cover innovative systems and technologies for soft robot legged locomotion, soft robot manipulation, underwater soft robotics, biomimetic soft robotic platforms, plant-inspired soft robots, flying soft robots, soft robotics in surgery, as well as methods for their modeling and control. Based on the results of the second edition of the Soft Robotics Week, held on April 25 - 30, 2016, in Livorno, Italy, the book reports on the major research lines and novel technologies presented and discussed during the event.

This Festschrift volume, published in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Artificial Intelligence, includes 34 refereed papers written by leading researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The papers were carefully selected from the invited lectures given at the 50th Anniversary Summit of AI, held at the Centro Stefano Franscini, Monte VeritA, Ascona, Switzerland, July 9-14, 2006.

The summit provided a venue for discussions on historical, business, political and educational perspectives of AI; scientific exchange on the state of the art; speculations about the future; contributions by researchers from different but related areas; presentations of the latest research by top scientists in the field; as well as many informal discussions among the participants and visitors. The selected papers reflect the breadth of the topics presented and discussed at the summit, covering subjects ranging from the history and prospects of AI, to speech recognition and processing, linguistics, bionics, and consciousness.

The papers are organized in topical sections on Historical and Philosophical Issues; Information Theory and Quantification; Morphology and Dynamics; Neurorobotics; Machine Intelligence, Cognition, and Natural Language Processing; Human-Like Intelligence: Motivation, Emotions, and Consciousness; Robot Platforms; and Art and AI.

Originating from a Dagstuhl seminar, the collection of papers presented in this book constitutes on the one hand a representative state-of-the-art survey of embodied artificial intelligence, and on the other hand the papers identify the important research trends and directions in the field.

Following an introductory overview, the 23 papers are organized into topical sections on

- philosophical and conceptual issues

- information, dynamics, and morphology

- principles of embodiment for real-world applications

- developmental approaches

- artificial evolution and self-reconfiguration

The last decade has witnessed an increasing interest in the more active use of soft materials in robotic systems. Having a soft body like the ones in biological systems can potentially provide a robot with superior capabilities. For example, soft body can help the robots to adaptively navigate through small openings, softness can prevent injuries in human-robot interaction, while deformable body can also store and release energy, which may lead to energy effciency in locomotion tasks. By building robotic systems with soft materials, we can realize systems that are safer, cheaper, and more adaptable than the level that conventional rigid-material robots can achieve. Soft-Material Robotics introduces the fundamental aspects of this vibrant research topic from history, modelling, control, and system integration. This content sets it apart from previous review efforts that have focused on presenting individual case studies.