This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th Conference on Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems, TAROS 2012 and the 15th Robot World Congress, FIRA 2012, held as joint conference in Bristol, UK, in August 2012. The 36 revised full papers presented together with 25 extended abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 89 submissions. The papers cover various topics in the field of autonomous robotics.

A powerful new image presentation technique has evolved over the last twenty years, and its value demonstrated through its support of many and varied common tasks. Conceptually, Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) is basically simple, exemplified in the physical world by the rapid riffling of the pages of a book in order to locate a known image. Advances in computation and graphics processing allow RSVP to be applied flexibly and effectively to a huge variety of common tasks such as window shopping, video fast-forward and rewind, TV channel selection and product browsing. At its heart is a remarkable feature of the human visual processing system known as pre-attentive processing, one which supports the recognition of a known image within as little as one hundred milliseconds and without conscious cognitive effort. Knowledge of pre-attentive processing, together with extensive empirical evidence concerning RSVP, has allowed the authors to provide useful guidance to interaction designers wishing to explore the relevance of RSVP to an application, guidance which is supported by a variety of illustrative examples.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th Conference on Advances in Autonomous Robotics, TAROS 2014, held in Birmingham, UK, in September 2014. The 23 revised full papers presented together with 9 extended abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. The overall program covers various aspects of robotics, including navigation, planning, sensing and perception, flying and swarm robots, ethics, humanoid robotics, human-robot interaction, and social robotics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th Conference on Advances in Autonomous Robotics, TAROS 2013, held in Oxford, UK, in August 2013. The 36 revised full papers presented together with 25 extended abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 89 submissions. The papers cover various topics such as artificial intelligence, bio-inspired and aerial robotics, computer vision, control, humanoid and robotic arm, swarm robotics, verification and ethics.