Experimental Robotics IV The 4th International Symposium, Stanford, California, June 30 – July 2, 1995

This is the fourth of the biennial Experimental Robotics symposia which are designed to bring together, in a small group setting, researchers from around the world who are at the forefront of experimental robotics research. The symposia are designed to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of research in robotics that focuses on theories and principles which have been experimentally validated. This proceedings volume includes the fifty-five contributions that were selected by the International Program Committee for presentation at the symposium. The contributions represent work in the areas of design, perception, control, planning, and robotic applications and are organized into twelve broadly-defined chapters for ease of reference. Research groups from twelve different countries have contributed to this work.

Collective and cooperative group behaviours: Biologically inspired experiments in robotics.- Distributed robotic manipulation: Experiments in minimalism.- A general framework for multi-robot cooperation and its implementation on a set of three hilare robots.- Cooperative autonomous low-cost robots for exploring unknown environments.- An object-oriented framework for event-driven dextrous manipulation.- Toward obstacle avoidance in intermittent dynamical environments.- Integrating grasp planning and visual servoing for automatic grasping.- contact and grasp robustness measures: Analysis and experiments.- Performance limits and stiffness control of multifingered hands.- Real-time vision plus remote-brained design opens a new world for experimental robotics.- Experimental validation of an active visual control scheme based on a reduced set of image parameters.- Task oriented model-driven visually servoed agents.- Experiments in hand-eye coordination using active vision.- Visual positioning and docking of non-holonomic vehicles.- An intelligent observer.- The development of a robotic endoscope.- The extender technology: An example of human-machine interaction via the transfer of power and information signals.- Coordinated and force-feedback control of hydraulic excavators.- Experiments with a real-time structure-from-motion system.- Robotic perception of material: Experiments with shape-invariant acoustic measures of material type.- Multi-level 3D-tracking of objects integrating velocity estimation based on optical flow and kalman-filtering.- Experimental approach on artificial active antenna.- Low cost sensor based obstacle detection and description.- Parameter sensitivity analysis for design and control of tendon transmissions.- Stiffness isn't everything.- In pursuit of dynamic range: Using parallel coupled actuators to overcome hardware limitations.- Total least squares in robot calibration.- Symbolic modelling and experimental determination of physical parameters for complex elastic manipulators.- Learning compliant motions by task-demonstration in virtual environments.- Motion control for a hitting task: A learning approach to inverse mapping.- Experimental verification of progressive learning control for high-speed direct-drive robots with structure flexibility and non-collocated sensors.- Accurate positioning of devices with nonlinear friction using fuzzy logic pulse controller.- Platooning for small public urban vehicles.- Robust vehicle navigation.- Dynamic analysis of off-road vehicles.- An autonomous guided vehicle for cargo handling applications.- Robots that take advice.- Towards principled experimental study of autonomous mobile robots.- Mission programming: Application to underwater robots.- Specification, formal verification and implementation of tasks and missions for an autonomous vehicle.- Experimental study on modeling and control of flexible manipulators using virtual joint model.- Experimental research on impact dynamics of spaceborne manipulator systems.- An operational space formulation for a free-flying, multi-arm space robot.- Experimental research of a nonholonomic manipulator.- Mobile manipulation of a fragile object.- Empirical verification of fine-motion planning theories.- Estimating throughput for a flexible part feeder.- Interest of the dual hybrid control scheme for teleoperation with time delays for proceeding of ISER'95.- Robot force control experiments with an actively damped compliant end effector.- Improved force control for conventional arms using wrist-based torque feedback.- Indoor navigation of an inverse pendulum type autonomous mobile robot with adaptive stabilization control system.- Motion and perception strategies for outdoor mobile robot navigation in unknown environments.- Programming symmetric platonic beast robots.- An experimental study on motion control of a biped locomotion machine using reaction wheels.- Real-time programming of mobile robot actions using advanced control techniques.