Experimental Robotics: The 10th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (39)) 2008th Edition

These are the papers delivered at a robotics conference in 2006. You might wonder why the book just came out in 2008. But there are inevitable delays in the physical publishing of any book. Plus I imagine that the papers here were perhaps peer reviewed before acceptance by the editors.The chapters are grouped into topics like manipulation, vision, navigation, field work and others. All of these fields have a lot of effort and the papers in them delineate progress made in recent years.For navigation, one characteristics is the common use of GPS for robust location estimation. Various field robots are reported on, that are impressively "intelligent" in performing some set tasks. Someone in this field will note the high amount of autonomy, as compared to earlier efforts. No doubt that in turn, this will soon be surpassed.A professional reader might also want to look at  Springer Handbook of Robotics . This also came out in 2008, and one of its editors (Khatib) is also one of the editors of the current book.