Symposium "Challenges in Robotics: Down to Earth" 2011

Robotics research and its application in real-world scenarios made vast progress over the last decades and provided fundamentally new solutions to automation and autonomous systems. Robots developed from being pure positioning machines, whose purpose was to automate production processes, to full-scale humanoids, interactive teleoperated systems, or unmanned driving and flying systems. The colloquium „Challenges in Robotics: Down to Earth“ features talks of internationally renown leaders and pioneers, who contributed several of the fundamental breakthroughs in the major fields of robotics research. The speakers give an overview of the history, state-of-the-art, and future of robotics, providing a large-scale view on nowadays major open problems and next possible application areas. Fundamental aspects in design, control, perception, navigation, learning, and reasoning will be discussed in the context of diverse application areas as for example service, space, aerial, and field robotics.