Special Issue on ROBOMEC’09 (Part 2)

Robotics and Mechatronics Conference 2009 (ROBOMEC’09) was held at the Fukuoka International Congress Center in Fukuoka, Japan, on May 24-26, 2009, sponsored by the Robotics and Mechatronics Division of the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers (JSME). Prof. Tsutomu Hasegawa of Kyushu University served as general chair and Prof. Kazuo Kiguchi of Saga University as program chair. The conference theme was “Robotics and Mechatronics for creating an affluent society.” Over 1,000 presentations were made in some 70 sessions, and participants numbered 1,500 including those from abroad, making it a great success. We asked the ROBOMEC’09 program committee to select outstanding presentations, among which they presented 115. We recommended that authors submit their original work to the special issue on ROBOMEC’09, and received 36. This special issue, Part 2, presents 19 papers strictly reviewed and accepted from among the 36. 13 accepted papers have already appeared in Part 1 (Vol.22, No.2). We are pleased with the very high quality of these papers, and are confident that readers will find them both interesting and instructive in the fields of robotics and mechatronics. We thank the authors for their invaluable contributions and the reviewers for their time and effort. We also thank Editor-in-Chief Prof. Tatsuo Arai of Osaka University for organizing this special issue.