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This book provides about 50 contributions in the area of robot kinematics, the basic research sub-field of robotics. The main impetus is on the recent advances in the field. This latest volume reports the newest scientific and applicative results.

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The ?rst International Meeting of Advances in Robot Kinematics, ARK, occurred in September 1988, by invitation to Ljubljana, Slovenia, of a group of 20 int- nationally recognized researchers, representing six different countries from three continents. There were 22 lectures and approximately 150 attendees. This success of bringing together excellent research and the international community, led to the formation of a Scienti?c Committee and the decision to repeat the event biannually. The meeting was made open to all individuals with a critical peer review process of submitted papers. The meetings have since been continuously supported by the Jozef ? Stefan Institute and since 1992 have come under patronage of the Inter- tionalFederationforthePromotionofMechanismandMachineScience(IFToMM). Springer published the ?rst book of the series in 1991 and since 1994 Kluwer and Springer have published a book of the presented papers every two years. The papers in this book present the latest topics and methods in the kinem- ics, control and design of robotic manipulators. They consider the full range of - botic systems, including serial, parallel and cable driven manipulators, both planar and spatial. The systems range from being less than fully mobile to kinematically redundant to overconstrained. The meeting included recent advances in emerging areas such as the design and control of humanoids and humanoid subsystems, the analysis, modeling and simulation of human body motion, the mobility analysis of protein molecules and the development of systems which integrate man and - chine.

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Jadran Lenarcic has been Professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, since 1988. He is Director of the J. Stefan Institute of Automatics, Biocybernetics and Robotics since 2005. He is a member of the executive committee of the International Federation for the Theory of Machines and Mechanisms, member of the Board of the European Robotics network, and memebr of the Executive Board of the European Association of Research and Technology Organisations. He is regular member of the Slovenian Academy of Engineering Science.

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