Intelligent robotics has become the focus of extensiveresearch activity. This effort has been motivated by thewide variety of applications that can benefit from thedevelopments. These applications often involve mobilerobots, multiple robots working and interacting in the samework area, and operations in hazardous environments likenuclear power plants. Applications in the consumer andservice sectors are also attracting interest. Theseapplications have highlighted the importance of performance,safety, reliability, and fault tolerance.This volume is a selection of papers from a NATO AdvancedStudy Institute held in July 1989 with a focus on activeperception and robot vision. The papers deal with suchissues as motion understanding, 3-D data analysis, errorminimization, object and environment modeling, objectdetection and recognition, parallel and real-time vision,and data fusion. The paradigm underlying the papers is thatrobotic systems require repeated and hierarchicalapplication of the perception-planning-action cycle. Theprimary focus of the papers is the perception part of thecycle. Issues related to complete implementations are alsodiscussed.
