Rapid advances in sensors, computers, and algorithms continue to fuel dramatic improvements in intelligent robots. Recently, for example, robot vehicles have been installed in public settings to perform such tasks as delivering items in hospitals and cleaning floors in supermarkets. This Dagstuhl seminar was organized by Dr. Robert C. Bolles (SRI International, USA), Prof. Horst Bunke (University of Bern, Switzerland), and Prof. Hartmut Noltemeier (University of Würzburg, Germany) to bring together researchers in this dynamic field. It included 34 participants from 11 different countries (Austria, Brasil, Germany, Hungary, Japan, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and USA). 30 presentations were made, plus a video session was held to demonstrate the current state-of-the-art of research vehicles. In addition, on Wednesday afternoon, the group took a long hike through the beautiful surroundings of Schloss Dagstuhl.

The seminar covered the wide range of topics associated with this field, including static and dynamic robot environment modelling; multisensor fusion; active vision; knowledge representation for spatial and spatial-temporal reasoning; reactive behavior; motion planning for autonomous vehicles and manipulators; assembly planning and flexible manufacturing; knowledge acquisition and learning for autonomous robots; architectures and implementation; special applications in manufacturing, medicine, space exploration, telerobotics and service robots.

Schloss Dagstuhl offers an ideal setting for meeting new people and discussing the latest ideas. As one participant said, “The meeting was excellent – I enjoyed talking with everyone, the weather was great, and the food and drinks were superb.”

Creative Commons BY 3.0 Unported license