ment on numerical control (NC) machines for milling and lathing grew into a large commercial industry.

In the early 1980s, around the time the film Star Wars came out, robots became America's media darlings. They were suddenly friendly and desirable. Intoxicating predictions were made about robots leading to the end of human labor. Many companies invested in robots but faced the challenge of making them work reliably. Unrealistic expectations led to disillusionment and the failure of many robot companies at the end of that decade.

Today, there are almost 700,000 robots at work in industry. Approximately 80,000 robots were sold throughout the world in 1996, accounting for gross sales of over $5 billion. Almost half of those robots were installed in Japan, about 10,000 were installed in the United States and Germany, respectively, and the remaining 20,000 were installed in Korea, Italy, France, and other countries. By far the largest application areas are welding and painting, followed by machining and assembly. The largest customers are the automotive industry, followed by electronics, food, and pharmaceuticals (United Nations/Economic Commission for Europe and International Federation of Robotics, 1997).

Throughout this turbulence robotics continues to be an active and thriving area of research. Some of its subareas are kinematics (the study of positions and velocities), dynamics (the study of forces), and motion planning (how to get an object from here to there while avoiding obstacles). The so-called "piano movers" problem was solved in the 1980s when a breakthrough showed that it could be reduced to a well-known problem of deciding the truth value of algebraic sentences (Latombe, 1991). Other areas include grasping, locomotion, actuator design (the direct-drive robot arm was another breakthrough in the 1980s), and sensor design (a reliable tactile sensor is still being pursued).

Robotics is highly interdisciplinary, including specialists from fields such as mechanical engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, and industrial engineering. Research is sponsored in this country by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and industry. Similar sponsors are found for research in Japan, Australia, and Europe. Almost all universities have research groups working in robotics. The largest international research organization is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Society of Robotics and Automation, founded in 1984.

There are many frontiers of robotics. Theories from areas such as nonlinear control, Lie algebra, computational geometry, and computational algebra are being applied to such topics as medical and surgical robots, microscale robots, Internet robots, modular robots, and robot toys for education and entertainment. It is impossible to cover all of these frontiers in one session. For the Frontiers symposium I worked closely with Susan Corwin of Intel and Rob Howe of Harvard to select the following four roboticists to represent a cross section of the best new work in our field.

Front Matter (R1-R12)

Biomaterials and Optical Imaging for Biomedicine (1-34)

Advanced Materials (35-62)

Simulation in Manufacturing (63-84)

Robotics (85-110)

Dinner Speech (111-122)

Contributors (123-130)

Program (131-134)

Participants (135-144)

Glossary (145-146)