Special issue on robotics: science and systems

Abstract

This issue of Autonomous Robots presents journal articles that are based on papers originally presented at the 2013 Robotics Science and Systems conference, held in Berlin, Germany. Although these were selected by a committee to exemplify the best papers presented that year, the decision over which papers to include was a difficult one due to the substantial number of very strong papers in the cohort.While the strength of these papers can be partially attributed to the fact that the conference itself generally attracts strong papers, it is also a sign of the maturation of our field. The papers in this issue reflect a few broad themes that are currently attracting the attention of the robotics research community: the development of multi-agent systems (where the agents can be either multiple robots, or a mixture of humans and robots), the link between sensing andmanipulation in robotic systems, and the continuing use of sophisticated probabilistic representations in robot control. In the paper “Multivariate Evaluation of Interactive Robot Systems” amethod for evaluating interactive robotic systems is described. This work emphasizes the ability to evaluate a complex system with a large number of design variables using tools from multiple regression, and does so in the context of human–robot interaction where exhaustive methods would be impractical. The context is that of understanding