Special Issue on the Tenth International Symposium on Experimental Robotics

This special issue consists of eight papers drawn from presentations at the Eleventh International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER08). ISER is a series of biennial symposia whose goal is to provide the robotics community with a forum for research driven by creative ideas, bold visions, new systems, and novel applications of robotics, emphasizing experimental work. The tradition in ISER is to foster scholarly work that either addresses validation of theoretical paradigms through careful experimentation or the creation of novel experimental platforms that in turn inspire new theoretical paradigms. The Program included technical papers reporting on new theoretical and experimental results, as well as position papers focused on new visions and trends for the field. The topics of the technical sessions covered a broad spectrum of experimental robotics research activities. The sessions were The papers in the special issue present exciting results in experimental robotics spanning a wide range of problem areas. The first four papers present research on estimation, control and planning for autonomous vehicles. • Dolgov, Thrun, Montemerlo and Diebel describe path planning used by vehicles driving around in an urban environment such as was used in the DARPA Urban Challenge. The authors use a hybrid A* search on an evolving map that is built dynamically as it is created by the moving vehicle and demonstrate its real-time performance. • Huang, Mourikis and Roumeliotis address the problem of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) inconsistency. The authors examine the observability properties of the original non-linear system and the limitations of the linearized approximation used for an extended Kalman filter (EKF), and develop a new estima-tor that has the right observability properties. • He, Bachrach, Achtelik and Geramifard present algorithms for vision and state estimation with applications to navigation of micro air vehicles, and the planning and control under uncertainty. and Rus describe adaptive control of underwater robots with changing body weight and dynamics with experimental results. The next two papers develop novel manipulator and hand designs. and Cutkosky develop a hybrid actuation system and a bio-inspired design for a robot arm that combined pneumatic artificial muscles and an electrical motor. • Dollar and Howe propose a new compliant gripper design capable of adapting to a wide range of objects. The last two papers propose novel designs for actuation, recon-figuration and adaptation for robots at smaller length scales. • White and Yim present a new design for reconfigurable robot modules as …