Advances in telerobotics

At the dawn of the new millennium, robotics is undergoing a major transformation in scope and dimension. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics is rapidly expanding into the challenges of unstructured environments. Interacting with, assi- ing, serving, and exploring with humans, the emerging robots will increasingly touch people and their lives. The goal of the new series of Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR) is to bring, in a timely fashion, the latest advances and developments in robotics on the basis of their signi cance and quality. It is our hope that the wider dissemination of research developments stimulates exchanges and collaborations among the research community and contributes to further advancement of this rapidly growing eld. The edited volume by Manuel Ferre, Martin Buss, Rafael Aracil, Claudio M- chiorri and Carlos Balaguer is focused on the most recent advances in telerobotics, a technology that deals with the inclusion of a human operator in the control loop of a remote robot. Telerobotics encompasses an area at the crossroads of several scienti c disciplines such as mechatronics, control, communication, computers, sensor-based recognition, multimodality and even teleoperation through Internet.