Editorial

Extract

The idea underlying this Special Issue arises from previous successfully international events organized in this robotics context. Thus, during 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, hosted in Edmonton, Canada, a Workshop, with the same title was successfully organized by this guest editor. Moreover, this editor was involved in this research area, as co-Chair of the “Manipulation and Grasping Interest Group”, within the European Robotics Research Network (i.e. EURON), from 2001, organizing also a couple of International Summer Schools, supported by EURON, on these topics (Spain, 2001 and 2004). On the other hand, as time goes by, more and more robotics applications are oriented towards working in all kind of service domains, such as hospitals, museums, etc. Hence, the interest on those robotic systems, integrating manipulation and navigation capabilities, namely mobile manipulators, is drastically increasing around the entire world. Therefore, this special issue is trying to face this new scenario providing a comprehensive overview of some key topics, foundations and applications within the Mobile Manipulators context, including human-robot interaction aspects and critical issues related with navigation and manipulation performance, among others.