Robotics: Science and Systems IV

held at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich Switzerland, from June 25 to June 28, 2008. Robotics: Science and Systems is a single-track conference that aims to showcase the best research and the most exciting systems from all areas of robotics at a single conference to a broad audience. Special provisions are made to enable students to participate in this conference. This year, there were two different kinds of travel awards available to students. Robotics: Science and Systems was technically cosponsored by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, the International Foundation of Robotics Research, and AAAI. Funding for the conference was provided by the National Science Foundation, the Naval Research Laboratory, ABB, Microsoft Research, Microsoft Robotics, Evolution Robotics, Willow Garage, and Intel. Springer sponsored the best student paper award. The meeting brought together more than 280 researchers from Europe, Asia, North America, and Australia. The papers presented at the meeting and compiled here cover a wide range of topics in robotics spanning computer vision, mapping, terrain identification, distributed systems, localization, manipulation, collision avoidance, multibody dynamics, obstacle detection, microrobotic systems, pursuit evasion, grasping and manipulation, tracking, spatial kinematics, machine learning, sensor networks, and applications such as autonomous driving and Reports