Editorial: Special Issue on the Fourth International Conference on Field and Service Robotics, 2003

much attention has been increasingly paid to the technology of field and service robotics. The FSR conferences have been held bi-a collection of selected papers from FSR'03. To promote the robot industry, the potential needs and the market of robot technology have been investigated, and it has been predicted that field and service robots is the area most expected to enlarge the robot market rather than manufacturing. At FSR conferences, many exciting cutting-edge technologies have been introduced and discussed, and from this was proposed the probabilistic approach represented by SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping), which dramatically made solvable the localization and mapping issues in real environments. This technology is extensive, not only in robot science, but also in robot applications. Furthermore, the evolution in sensing technologies and infrastructures for robot navigation, such as laser range sensors, GPS, etc. have made great contribution to the localization, mapping, and navigation. Since the first FSR conference was held, great progress has been achieved in field and service robotics, and the available technology which has evolved has made feasible the introduction of mobile robots and vehicles to various actual applications. In addition, conventional research on mechanical design, perception, planning, and control as well as learning has also grown in these years. An intensive effort was made to accommodate to uncertainty and complexity in the environment, even in the human co-existent environment. Realization of the adaptive function of robots has been pursued. It should also be noted that attention has been increasingly paid to the services which can be delivered by robot technology rather than the function of the robot itself. Sixty-eight papers were submitted to FSR'03, and 49 original papers were selected for presentation based on the outcome of a strict review process by the program committee members. The contents of the papers presented at FSR'03 are very interesting. All the presented papers will be published as a monograph book of the STAR series from Springer, which is entitled " Field and Service Robotics: Recent Advances in Research andApplications. " For this special issue we selected 11 papers which were rated very highly by the reviewers. The authors of these invited papers were requested to submit revised and extended versions from those of the proceedings papers, and also to include some up-to-date results. All the papers were subjected to the IJRR normal review process, after which six papers were finally accepted for publication of …