Todaya (TM)s mobile robot perception is insufficient for acting goal-directedly in unconstrained, dynamic everyday environments like a home, a factory, or a city. Subject to restrictions in bandwidth, computer power, and computation time, a robot has to react to a wealth of dynamically changing stimuli in such environments, requiring rapid, selective attention to decisive, action-relevant information of high current utility. Robust and general engineering methods for effectively and efficiently coupling perception, action and reasoning are unavailable. Interesting performance, if any, is currently only achieved by sophisticated robot programming exploiting domain features and specialties, which leaves ordinary users no chance of changing how the robot acts. The purpose of this volume - outcome of a GI-Dagstuhl Seminar held in Dagstuhl Castle in June 2006 - is to give a first overview on the concept of affordances for the design and implementation of autonomous mobile robots acting goal-directedly in a dynamic environment. The aim is to develop affordance-based control as a method for robotics. The potential of this new methodology will be shown by going beyond navigation-like tasks towards goaldirected autonomous manipulation in the project demonstrators.

In the late sixteenth century, a prominent Albanian named Antonio Bruni composed a revealing document about his home country. Historian Sir Noel Malcolm takes this document as a point of departure to explore the lives of the entire Bruni family, whose members included an archbishop of the Balkans, the captain of the papal flagship at the Battle of Lepanto--at which the Ottomans were turned back in the Eastern Mediterranean--in 1571, and a highly placed interpreter in Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire that fell to the Turks in 1453. The taking of Constantinople had profoundly altered the map of the Mediterranean. By the time of Bruni's document, Albania, largely a Venetian province from 1405 onward, had been absorbed into the Ottoman Empire. Even under the Ottomans, however, this was a world marked by the ferment of the Italian Renaissance.
In Agents of Empire, Malcolm uses the collective biography of the Brunis to paint a fascinating and intimate picture of Albania at a moment when it represented the frontier between empires, cultures, and religions. The lives of the polylingual, cosmopolitan Brunis shed new light on the interrelations between the Ottoman and Christian worlds, characterized by both conflict and complex interdependence. The result of years of archival detective work, Agents of Empire brings to life a vibrant moment in European and Ottoman history, challenging our assumptions about their supposed differences. Malcolm's book guides us through the exchanges between East and West, Venetians and the Ottomans, and tells a story of worlds colliding with and transforming one another.

Historian Eric R Dursteler reconsiders identity in the early modern world to illuminate Veneto-Ottoman cultural interaction and coexistence, challenging the model of hostile relations and suggesting instead a more complex understanding of the intersection of cultures. Although dissonance and strife were certainly part of this relationship, he argues, coexistence and cooperation were more common.
Moving beyond the "clash of civilizations" model that surveys the relationship between Islam and Christianity from a geopolitical perch, Dursteler analyzes the lived reality by focusing on a localized microcosm: the Venetian merchant and diplomatic community in Muslim Constantinople.
While factors such as religion, culture, and political status could be integral elements in constructions of self and community, Dursteler finds early modern identity to be more than the sum total of its constitutent parts and reveals how the fluidity and malleability of identity in this time and place made coexistence among disparate cultures possible.

This book demolishes the widely held view that the phrase 'medieval business' is an oxymoron. The authors review the entire range of business in medieval western Europe, probing its Roman and Christian heritage to discover the economic and political forces that shaped the organization of agriculture, manufacturing, construction, mining, transportation and marketing. Businessmen's responses to the devastating plagues, famines, and warfare that beset Europe in the late Middle Ages are equally well covered. Medieval businessmen's remarkable success in coping with this hostile new environment was 'a harvest of adversity' that prepared the way for the economic expansion of the sixteenth century. Two main themes run through this book. First, the force and direction of business development in this period stemmed primarily from the demands of the elite. Second, the lasting legacy of medieval businessmen was less their skillful adaptations of imported inventions than their brilliant innovations in business organization.

Reconfiguring the national myth of Jamestown's failure, Karen Kupperman shows how the settlement's distinctly messy first decade actually represents a period of ferment in which individuals were learning how to make a colony work. Despite the settlers' dependence on the Chesapeake Algonquians and strained relations with their London backers, they forged a tenacious colony that survived where others had failed. Indeed, the structures and practices that evolved through trial and error in Virginia would become the model for all successful English colonies, including Plymouth.

The Seven Years' War was the world's first global conflict, spanning five continents and the critical sea lanes that connected them. Winner of the 2005 France-Ameriques Prize, this book is the fullest account ever written of the French navy's role in the hostilities. It is also the most complete survey of both phases of the war: the French and Indian War in North America (1754-60) and the Seven Years' War in Europe (1756-63). By considering both phases of the war from every angle, Jonathan R. Dull shows not only that the two conflicts are so interconnected that neither can be fully understood in isolation but also that traditional interpretations of the war are largely inaccurate. His work also explains how the French navy, supposedly utterly crushed, could have figured so prominently in the War of American Independence only fifteen years later. A comprehensive work integrating diplomatic, naval, military, and political history, "The French Navy and the Seven Years' War" thoroughly explores the French perspective on the Seven Years' War.