Page 25 - Sensing, Intelligence, Motion : How Robots and Humans Move in an Unstructured World
P. 25
xxiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
From the beginning of this research in the late 1980s, the National Science
Foundation was incredibly generous to me, funding in parallel the theory/software
and the hardware/sensing lines of this work. I am also indebted to the Sandia
Laboratories and Hitachi Corporation for providing necessary resources.
Every book has to be started, and that moment calls for an appropriate setting.
My thanks go to the Rockefeller Foundation, whose invitation to spend a month
at the incomparable Villa Serbelloni in the village of Bellagio, Lake Como, Italy,
made the start of this book quick and easy. Putting in a day of work, along with a
couple more hours in the evening, was tiring but easy, in anticipation of the game
of bocce on the lake by 5 o’clock and then dressing up for drinks and dinner
with the Villa’s guest artists and writers and scientists, among the seventeenth-
century rugs and furniture. It is not for nothing that the Villa Serbelloni’s library
is crammed with books authored by many of its visitors from all over the world.
V. J. L.
