Robotics for Challenging Environments

This volume, ""Robotics for Challenging Environments"", contains the papers presented at the ASCE Specialty Conference on Robotics for Challenging Environments, held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 26 - March 3, 1994. The conference provided a forum for the exchange of ideas between those working on technologies for robotic and teleoperated systems, and those investigating the application of such systems in a variety of hazardous and unstructured field operations. The volume is divided into two parts: supporting technologies and application areas. Supporting technologies includes papers on vision and virtual environments, operator control interfaces, path planning and navigation, and planning and control of excavation. Application areas includes papers on lunar rovers, robotic applications in space, multi-robot and multi-vehicle systems, teleoperated vehicles for hazardous sites, robotic applications in nuclear facilities, environmental inspection and remediation, robotic applications in infrastructure maintenance, automation and robotics for construction, and automation for mining and waste containment. It is hoped that this proceedings will help foster communication across different application areas so that common needs may be identified and used to drive research on supporting technologies.