SHIGEO HIROSE Professor Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Tokyo Institute of Technology
Our latest topics on field and service robotics I will introduce some of our latest topics related to the field and service robotics, e.g. arm mounted buggy robot "Gryphon V" for humanitarian demining, quadruped walking robot "TITAN XI" for steep slope construction tasks, multi-wheeled "Expliner" for the inspection of high-voltage transmission lines, and pneumatic-driven weight-balancing arm "Float-Arm" for the human cooperative automobile assembly task. The buggy vehicle of the "Gryphon V" is mounting an arm with wide motion range and other devices for mine detection. Through several experiments conducted on mine test sites in Cambodia and Croatia, the Gryphon V already showed high robustness and better performance of mine detection than that of human deminers. The 7 ton world largest quadruped walking robot "TITAN-XI" can walk around on the surface of steep slope by avoiding the damage of the lattice-like ferroconcrete frames by using a pair of suspension wires, new vision system and intelligent gait control system. "Explainer" is now developing to make the detail inspection of high-voltage lines to prevent blackout during inspection task. It already succeeded to go over obstacles by changing the CG of its multi-joint body and to move around on 500K voltage lines. From the introduction of these examples, I will finally try to extract some of the basic design principles for field and service robots.

		CHRISTIAN LAUGIER Research Director INRIA Rhône-Alpes
Human, Dynamic and Open Environments: A New Challenge for Robotics     One of the dreams of researchers in Robotics is to develop robots having the capability to -Y´shareˇ the human living space. Thanks to the recent technological progress in sensor technologies, robotics technologies, miniaturized mechatronic systems, and embedded computational power this dream is gradually becoming a reality. In the past few years, some autonomous robots have already been successfully immersed in realistic human environments such as museums (robots for guiding visitors) or urban road environments populated by both autonomous vehicles and cars driven by human beings (the 2007 DARPA Urban challenge).     However, the successful deployment of autonomous robots among human beings is still a real challenge: having some successful large experiments in realistic human environments is clearly a necessary but insufficient step; indeed, major issues such as ´Robustness to uncertaintyˇ and ´Safetyˇ have to be more deeply addressed. Consequently, previous approaches have to be deeply revisited with this point of view, and new models and methods have to be designed in three main complementary research directions: (1) Robust perception and understanding of the surrounding environment, which is highly dynamic, open, and partially known, e.g. some moving obstacles having unknown behaviours might suddenly show up; (2) Autonomous navigation with a special emphasis on the Safety issue, i.e. how to guarantee a given level of safety when making goal-oriented navigation decisions in the presence of real world uncertainty; and (3) Impact of the human factor in the involved decision processes.     In this talk, these three issues will be addressed and the most promising current developments and results in the related technical areas will be presented. More precisely, difficulties and approaches to solving the following problems will be discussed: Robust detection and tracking of moving entities in urban road environments; Prediction of the future behaviours of the detected moving entities and probabilistic evaluation of the related risk of collision; Safe goal-oriented navigation decisions in uncertain environments; Human-robot interaction for the shared control of an autonomous mobile robot.

		MARC RAIBERT Founder Boston Dynamics
What is next for BigDog, the rough-terrain robot? BigDog has hiked in rocky, muddy and snowy terrain, traveled over 12 miles without stopping, visually followed a human leader, and done limited autonomous cross country travel. So what's next for BigDog? This talk will give a roadmap.

		PETER WURMAN Engineering Fellow, Software Architecture KIVA Systems Associate Professor Dept. of Computer Science North Carolina State University
Moving robotics out of the lab and into commercial systems presents a myriad of technical and business challenges. Kiva systems has developed a warehouse management system that employs hundreds of mobile robots to move shelving units around distribution centers run by companies like Staples, Walgreens, and Zappos. With deployed systems exceeding 500 robots in a single facility, Kiva's warehouses represent the largest working collections of mobile robotic systems in the world. As chief architect and cofounder of Kiva Systems, Pete has worked on many of the coordination and control problems inherent in the technology and its application to warehousing. In this talk, Pete will discuss some of the challenges the team has faced in bringing the Kiva system to market.