In the last years we are witnessing major improvements in the field of robotics due do technological developments in the areas of computing, telecommunication, software, electronic devices. The impact of the internet application and especially the web-based ones gave a boast to the development of the so called ubiquitous robots. It is only a matter of time - actually about 20 years, maybe less - before a robot in every home is as common as a car in every garage. In the same time, robotics involves important scientific/technological/philosophical breakthroughs.

The first is involved in the challenge to developing an autonomous, intelligent machine endowed with behaviors capacities and performance abilities similar, if not superior, to human’s. The second factor of novelty is the result of the interdisciplinarity of robotics, a science which – perhaps, for the first time in history – attracts knowledge and abilities from almost every discipline, from science and humanities.
From this specificity comes out the need to think about the lines of developments of the scientific paradigm of robotics; to start to consider robotics’ potentialities to trigger of a common process of development for the sciences and the humanities.

The proposed conference is not conceived as a technical workshop, but as a seminar whose aim is to see the current developments robotics in the perspective of the general history of the machines, of Automation and Control, of Wiener’s Cybernetics, and of the Artificial Intelligence.