This book presents the proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics held in Sydney in March 1999. Micro-machines, interplanetary exploration, minimally invasive surgery and emerging humanoid robots are among the most obvious attainments of leading robotics research teams reported in this volume.

From insects to robots.- Control and coordination of multiple mobile robots in manipulation and material handling tasks.- Experiments in constrained prehensile manipulation: Distributed manipulation with ropes.- Experiments with desktop mobile manipulators.- Experimental approach on grasping and manipulating multiple objects.- Preliminary results on the use of stereo, color cameras and laser sensors in antarctica.- Sensors for the object detection in environments with high heat radiation and photoresist or diffuse visibility conditions.- New techniques for 3D modeling ... ... and for doing without.- A mobile robot navigation by means of range data from ultra wide angle laser sensor and simple linguistic behavior instructions.- Explicit incorporation of 2D constraints in vision based control of robot manipulators.- Experiments with medium-level intelligent force control.- Coordinated manipulation under distributed impedance control.- Experiments and factory application of force control and contour following over visco-elastic surface.- Coordinated control of a nonholonomic mobile manipulator.- Exploiting redundancy for autonomous calibration of a planar robot.- Models for automated earthmoving.- Robot control in maxillofacial surgery.- Experiments and experiences in developing a large robot mining system.- Slope display on a locomotion interface.- Control of contact forces in wheeled and legged off-road vehicles.- Control of a gyroscopically stabilized robot.- Localization and map building for a mobile robot.- Construction and modelling of a carangiform robotic fish.- Can an underactuated leg with a passive spring at the knee achieve a ballistic step?.- Navigation of a martian rover in very rough terrain.- An experimental and theoretical investigation into simultaneous localisation and map building.- Continuous probabilistic mapping by autonomous robots.- Sensor influence in the performance of simultaneous mobile robot localization and map building.- Experimental analysis of adaptive concurrent mapping and localization using sonar.- Quasi real-time walking control of a bipedal humanoid robot based on walking pattern synthesis.- Experimental validation of physics-based planning and control algorithms for planetary robotic rovers.- Elastic strips: A framework for integrated planning and execution.- RoverBug: Long range navigation for mars rovers.- Human skill transfer using haptic virtual reality technology.- Experiments with web-based telerobots.- A review of robot world cup soccer research issues RoboCup: Today and tomorrow.- A portable programming framework.- ACME, a telerobotic active measurement facility.- A new computational model of friction applied to haptic rendering.- Macro-micro control to improve bilateral force-reflecting teleoperation.- Haptic surface exploration.- Force and vision feedback for robotic manipulation of the microworld.- Experiments on the control of flexible-link manipulators carrying large payloads.- Identification of joint elasticity of industrial robots.- Modelling friction in multi-loop linkages.- Implementation of dual-arm cooperative control by exploiting actuator back-drivability.- Towards human friendly robots: Vision-based interfaces and safe mechanisms.- Development of a humanoid H4 with soft and distributed tactile sensor skin.- Development of the torso robot — Design of the new shoulder mechanism ‘cybernetic shoulder’.- Combination of several vision sensors for interpretation of human actions.

This collection of papers will provide the reader with a concise report on the current achievements and future trends in robotics research across the world Contributions come from worldwide leading researchers in this field This book presents experimental results achieved in leading research teams