ISRR, the "International Symposium on Robotics Research", is one of robotics pioneering Symposia, which has established over the past two decades some of the field's most fundamental and lasting contributions. This book presents the results of the seventeenth edition of "Robotics Research" ISRR15, offering a collection of a broad range of topics in robotics. The content of the contributions provides a wide coverage of the current state of robotics research.: the advances and challenges in its theoretical foundation and technology basis, and the developments in its traditional and new emerging areas of applications. The diversity, novelty, and span of the work unfolding in these areas reveal the field's increased maturity and expanded scope and define the state of the art of robotics and its future direction.

In the past decade, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a disruptive force around the world, offering enormous potential for innovation but also creating hazards and risks for individuals and the societies in which they live. This volume addresses the most pressing philosophical, ethical, legal, and societal challenges posed by AI. Contributors from different disciplines and sectors explore the foundational and normative aspects of responsible AI and provide a basis for a transdisciplinary approach to responsible AI. This work, which is designed to foster future discussions to develop proportional approaches to AI governance, will enable scholars, scientists, and other actors to identify normative frameworks for AI to allow societies, states, and the international community to unlock the potential for responsible innovation in this critical field. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

ISRR, the "International Symposium on Robotics Research", is one of robotics pioneering Symposia, which has established over the past two decades some of the field's most fundamental and lasting contributions. This book presents the results of the seventeenth edition of "Robotics Research" ISRR15, offering a collection of a broad range of topics in robotics. The content of the contributions provides a wide coverage of the current state of robotics research.: the advances and challenges in its theoretical foundation and technology basis, and the developments in its traditional and new emerging areas of applications. The diversity, novelty, and span of the work unfolding in these areas reveal the field's increased maturity and expanded scope and define the state of the art of robotics and its future direction.

People have dreamed of machines, which would free them from unpleasant, dull, dirty and dangerous tasks and work for them as servants, for centuries if not millennia. Service robots seem to finally let these dreams come true. But where are all these robots that eventually serve us all day long, day for day? A few service robots have entered the market: domestic and professional cleaning robots, lawnmowers, milking robots, or entertainment robots. Some of these robots look more like toys or gadgets rather than real robots. But where is the rest? This is a question, which is asked not only by customers, but also by service providers, care organizations, politicians, and funding agencies. The answer is not very satisfying. Today's service robots have their problems operating in everyday environments. This is by far more challenging than operating an industrial robot behind a fence. There is a comprehensive list of technical and scientific problems, which still need to be solved. To advance the state of the art in service robotics towards robots, which are capable of operating in an everyday environment, was the major objective of the DESIRE project (Deutsche Service Robotik Initiative - Germany Service Robotics Initiative) funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant no. 01IME01A. This book offers a sample of the results achieved in DESIRE.

ISRR, the "International Symposium on Robotics Research", is one of robotics pioneering Symposia, which has established over the past two decades some of the field's most fundamental and lasting contributions. This book presents the results of the seventeenth edition of "Robotics Research" ISRR15, offering a collection of a broad range of topics in robotics. The content of the contributions provides a wide coverage of the current state of robotics research.: the advances and challenges in its theoretical foundation and technology basis, and the developments in its traditional and new emerging areas of applications. The diversity, novelty, and span of the work unfolding in these areas reveal the field's increased maturity and expanded scope and define the state of the art of robotics and its future direction.

People have dreamed of machines, which would free them from unpleasant, dull, dirty and dangerous tasks and work for them as servants, for centuries if not millennia. Service robots seem to finally let these dreams come true. But where are all these robots that eventually serve us all day long, day for day? A few service robots have entered the market: domestic and professional cleaning robots, lawnmowers, milking robots, or entertainment robots. Some of these robots look more like toys or gadgets rather than real robots. But where is the rest? This is a question, which is asked not only by customers, but also by service providers, care organizations, politicians, and funding agencies. The answer is not very satisfying. Today's service robots have their problems operating in everyday environments. This is by far more challenging than operating an industrial robot behind a fence. There is a comprehensive list of technical and scientific problems, which still need to be solved. To advance the state of the art in service robotics towards robots, which are capable of operating in an everyday environment, was the major objective of the DESIRE project (Deutsche Service Robotik Initiative - Germany Service Robotics Initiative) funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant no. 01IME01A. This book offers a sample of the results achieved in DESIRE.

For many years, Arti?cial Intelligence technology has served in a great variety of successful applications. AI researchand researchershave contributed much to the vision of the so-called Information Society. As early as the 1980s, some of us imagined distributed knowledge bases containing the explicable knowledge of a company or any other organization. Today, such systems are becoming reality. In the process, other technologies have had to be developed and AI-technology has blended with them, and companies are now sensitive to this topic. TheInternetandWWWhaveprovidedtheglobalinfrastructure,whileatthe same time companies have become global in nearly every aspect of enterprise. This process has just started, a little experience has been gained, and therefore it is tempting to re?ect and try to forecast, what the next steps may be. This has given us one of the two main topics of the 23rd Annual German Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (KI-99)held at the University of Bonn: The Knowledge Society. Two of our invited speakers, Helmut Willke, Bielefeld, and Hans-Peter Kriegel, Munich, dwell on di?erent aspects with di?erent perspectives. Helmut Willke deals with the concept of virtual organizations, while Hans-Peter Kriegel applies data mining concepts to pattern recognitiontasks.The three application forums are also part of the Knowledge Society topic: "IT-based innovation for environment and development", "Knowledge management in enterprises", and "Knowledgemanagementinvillageandcityplanningoftheinformationsociety".

Autonomous navigation is an essential capability for mobile robots. In order to operate robustly, a robot needs to know what the environment looks like, where it is in its environment, and how to navigate within it. Particle Filters for Robot Navigation summarizes approaches that address these three problems and that use particle filters as their main underlying model for representing beliefs. It illustrates that these filters are powerful tools that can robustly estimate the state of the robot and its environment and that they are also well-suited to making decisions about how to navigate in order to minimize a robot's uncertainty about its own position and the state of the environment. They offer a series of attractive capabilities, including the ability to deal with non-Gaussian distributions and nonlinear sensor and motion models. Particle filters have been used for almost twenty years in robotics and have become a standard means for a series of tasks. This is an ideal primer for anyone interested in the research and application of these filters in robotics.

A text that makes the mathematical underpinnings of robot motion accessible and relates low-level details of implementation to high-level algorithmic concepts. Robot motion planning has become a major focus of robotics. Research findings can be applied not only to robotics but to planning routes on circuit boards, directing digital actors in computer graphics, robot-assisted surgery and medicine, and in novel areas such as drug design and protein folding. This text reflects the great advances that have taken place in the last ten years, including sensor-based planning, probabalistic planning, localization and mapping, and motion planning for dynamic and nonholonomic systems. Its presentation makes the mathematical underpinnings of robot motion accessible to students of computer science and engineering, rleating low-level implementation details to high-level algorithmic concepts.