The topics of control engineering and signal processing continue to ?ourish and develop. In common with general scienti?c investigation, new ideas, concepts and interpretations emerge quite spontaneously and these are then discussed, used, discarded or subsumed into the prevailing subject paradigm. Sometimes these innovative concepts coalesce into a new sub-discipline within the broad subject tapestry of control and signal processing. This preliminary battle betweenoldandnewusuallytakesplaceatconferences,throughtheInternetand in the journals of the discipline. After a little more maturity has been acquired by the new concepts then archival publication as a scienti?c or engineering monograph may occur. A new concept in control and signal processing is known to have arrived when su?cient material has evolved for the topic to be taught as a specialised tutorial workshop or as a course to undergraduate, graduate or industrial engineers. Advanced Textbooks in Control and Signal Processing are designed as a vehicle for the systematic presentation of course material for both popular andinnovativetopicsinthediscipline.Itishopedthatprospectiveauthorswill welcome the opportunity to publish a structured and systematic presentation of some of the newer emerging control and signal processing technologies in the textbook series. Robots have appeared extensively in the artistic ?eld of science ?ction writing. The actual name robot arose from its use by the playwright Karel ? Capek in the play Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920). Not surprisingly, the artistic focus has been on mechanical bipeds with anthropomorphic personalities often termed androids. This focus has been the theme of such cinematic productions as, I, Robot (based on Isaac Asimov’s stories) and Stanley Kubrick’s ?lm, A.I.; however, this book demonstrates that robot technology is already widely used in industry and that there is some robot technology which is at prototype stage rapidly approaching introduction to commercial use. Currently, robots may be classi?ed according to their mobility attributes as shown in the ?gure.