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Message from Chairs

It is our pleasure to welcome to all delegates, representatives and participants from around the world to the 2000 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2000). This year, the IROS conference takes place at Kagawa University in Takamatsu City, Kagawa Prefecture, Japan from October 30, 2000 to November 5, 2000. Kagawa University is one of the old national universities in Japan, and very recently established the Faculty of Engineering. The conference will be held at the engineering school building of the university that was constructed last April and located in the Kagawa Intelligent Park. The Kagawa Intelligent Park was also recently built as a high technology research and industry area. The engineering school is the key organization in the Park. Takamatsu is a historical and beautiful city located in Shikoku, the smallest island in four main islands in Japan. There are several traditional sightseeing places, scenic places, and several excellent Japanese meals near to the conference place. We believe that the event will give you impressive experiences in both technical and sightseeing aspects.

The IROS started in 1988 to provide an opportunity of presenting papers and discussing common issues in robotics and intelligent systems. Since then, it has been held annually. Currently, it becomes one of the most important and well-known international conferences in the area of robotics and intelligent systems. The robotic technologies have so far made great contributions in several areas like manufacturing automation, releasing persons from hazardous tasks in nuclear power plant, undersea operations, supporting astronauts in space tasks, fire fighting and rescue operations and so on. Also, intelligent system technology based on the integration of computer/information science and technology, neural network/fuzzy control technologies, mechatronics and so on has provided a powerful tool to stimulate industrial activities and produce new products. In the past about ten years, we think IROS activities have played an important role to support those technical and social trends.

At the beginning of new millennium, our society has several big problems to be solved to maintain good quality of our life. Those are relating to saving natural resources, increase of aged population in the society, preservation of global environment and so on. We suppose that robotics and intelligent system technologies can be a powerful way and play a more important role to solve the problems our future society will have. Actually, there are strong expectations to robotics and intelligent system technologies in our society. There are new technological trends like computer network technologies, micro/nano technologies and so on, which make us expect to develop powerful robotic and intelligent system technologies applicable to new commercial markets. This also supports the above thought.

With those social needs and new technology trends in mind, we decided to have "Toward the New Paradigm of Robotics and Intelligent Systems in 21st Century" for the conference theme. To focus on the new technological trend, together with high quality regular technical sessions, many sessions organized by active researchers including timely topic papers have been planned. Regarding those regular and organized technical session papers, we introduced electrical paper submission and full paper review. Total number of papers we received was 521. Each paper was reviewed with three qualified reviewers and 378 papers were accepted. The number of the sessions planned for those papers was 96. Also International Mechatronics Forum including various review talks, three plenary talks, a banquet keynote speech, tutorials/workshops and two forums to discuss educational and industrial issues have been planned to provide the participants with various opportunities of presenting their research activities and collecting new and useful technological information. We are confident that everybody will be able to enjoy the conference and also obtain fruitful experiences from the participation in the conference.

Finally, we appreciate all contributions and cooperation by committee chairs, co-chairs, committee members, sponsoring organizations and supporting industries towards the success of the conference. Also, a special thanks is owed to all the authors, session organizers, invited speakers, exhibitors for contributing their research works and making the IROS2000 a successful and fruitful event.

Hiroshi Ishikawa 
Organizing Committee Chair
IROS2000
Kazuo Tanie
General Co-Chair
IROS2000
Guenther Schmidt
General Co-Chair
IROS2000
Hideki Hashimoto
Program Chair
IROS2000