Abstract
It is a pleasure to introduce this Special Issue on the 2016 Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR). WAFR is a prestigious, single-track, biennial international meeting devoted to recent advances on algorithmic problems in robotics. Robot algorithms are an important building block of robotic systems and are used to process inputs from users and sensors, perceive and build models of the environment, plan low-level motions and high-level tasks, control robotic actuators, and coordinate actions across multiple systems. Developing and analyzing these algorithms raise complex challenges, both theoretical and practical. Advances in the algorithmic foundations of robotics have applications to manufacturing, medicine, distributed robotics, human-robot interaction, intelligent prosthetics, computer animation, computational biology, and many other areas.