The 12th annual RoboCup International Symposium was held during July 15–18, 2008 in conjunction with RoboCup 2008 Competitions and Demonstrations. The symposium represents the core meeting for the presentation and discussion of sci- tific contributions in diverse areas related to the main threads within RoboCupSoccer, RoboCupRescue, RoboCup@Home and RoboCupJunior. Its scope encompassed, but was not restricted to, research and education activities within the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics. A fundamental aspect of RoboCup is promoting science and technology among young students and researchers, in addition to providing a forum for discussion and excitement about Robotics with practitioners from all over the world. Since its first edition in 1997 in Nagoya, the RoboCup Competitions and Symposium have attracted an increasing number of researchers and students from all the world and today it is a major event in robotics worldwide. Due to its interdisciplinary nature and the exploration of various and intimate c- nections of theory and practice across a wide spectrum of different fields, the sym- sium offered an excellent opportunity to introduce new techniques to various scientific disciplines. The experimental, interactive and benchmark character of the RoboCup initiative created the opportunity to present, learn and evaluate novel ideas and - proaches with significant potential. If promising, they are then rapidly adopted and field-tested by a large (and still strongly growing) community.

This book is the Proceedings of the 19th Annual RoboCup International Symposium, held in Hefei, China, in July 2015. The book contains 20 papers presented at the Symposium, carefully selected from 39 submissions. Additionally the book contains 11 champion team papers and one paper from the Workshop on Benchmarking Service Robots. The papers present current research in robotics, artificial intelligence, computer vision, multiagent systems, simulation, and other areas.

This second volume is a continuation of the successful first volume of this Springer book, and as well as addressing broader topics it puts a particular focus on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with Robot Operating System (ROS). Consisting of three types of chapters: tutorials, cases studies, and research papers, it provides comprehensive additional material on ROS and the aspects of developing robotics systems, algorithms, frameworks, and applications with ROS. ROS is being increasingly integrated in almost all kinds of robots and is becoming the de-facto standard for developing applications and systems for robotics. Although the research community is actively developing applications with ROS and extending its features, amount of literature references is not representative of the huge amount of work being done. The book includes 19 chapters organized into six parts: Part 1 presents the control of UAVs with ROS, while in Part 2, three chapters deal with control of mobile robots. Part 3 provides recent work toward integrating ROS with Internet, cloud and distributed systems. Part 4 offers five case studies of service robots and field experiments. Part 5 presents signal-processing tools for perception and sensing, and lastly, Part 6 introduces advanced simulation frameworks. The diversity of topics in the book makes it a unique and valuable reference resource for ROS users, researchers, learners and developers.

This book includes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 13th RoboCup International Symposium, held in Graz, Austria, in June/July, 2009. They cover scientific contributions to a variety of research areas related to all RoboCup divisions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Vision Systems, ICVS 2009, held in Liege, Belgium, October 13-15, 2009. The 21 papers for oral presentation presented together with 24 poster presentations and 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 96 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on human-machine-interaction, sensors, features and representations, stereo, 3D and optical flow, calibration and registration, mobile and autonomous systems, evaluation, studies and applications, learning, recognition and adaption.

This book examines how two distinct strands of research on autonomous robots, evolutionary robotics and humanoid robot research, are converging. The book will be valuable for researchers and postgraduate students working in the areas of evolutionary robotics and bio-inspired computing.

th This volume is an edition of the papers selected from the 12 FIRA RoboWorld C- gress, held in Incheon, Korea, August 16–18, 2009. The Federation of International Robosoccer Association (FIRA – www. fira. net) is a non-profit organization, which organizes robotic competitions and meetings around the globe annually. The RoboSoccer competitions started in 1996 and FIRA was - tablished on June 5, 1997. The Robot Soccer competitions are aimed at promoting the spirit of science and technology to the younger generation. The congress is a forum in which to share ideas and future directions of technologies, and to enlarge the human networks in robotics area. The objectives of the FIRA Cup and Congress are to explore the technical dev- opment and achievement in the field of robotics, and provide participants with a robot festival including technical presentations, robot soccer competitions and exhibits - der the theme “Where Theory and Practice Meet. ” th Under the umbrella of the 12 FIRA RoboWorld Incheon Congress 2009, six int- national conferences were held for greater impact and scientific exchange: th • 6 International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Robotics and Autonomous Systems (CIRAS) th • 5 International Symposium on Autonomous Minirobots for Research and Edutainment (AMiRE) • International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR) • International Conference on Advanced Humanoid Robotics Research (ICAHRR) • International Conference on Entertainment Robotics (ICER) • International Robotics Education Forum (IREF) This volume consists of selected quality papers from the six conferences.