The annual Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics (FCRAR) was created in 1988 as a joint initiative of robotics researchers from several Florida universities. At the time I served as Director of the FAU Robotics Center. In such capacity I have had the unique honor of being among the early founders of the event among whom were the late Dr. Joe Duffy (from UF) and Dr. Carl Crane, who at that time was still Dr. Duffy’s grad student. Much credit is due to Dr. Keith Doty (UF) and my colleague Dr. Oren Masory.

The two day conference has been going on year after year, normally between the Spring and Summer semesters,  rotating among the Florida universities and featuring 30-50 original papers each year.  It has been a prime gathering event of all Florida robotics researchers. The event allows every graduate student who works on a robotics related research to present his/her on-going progress. The professors present too and we often enjoy participation by industry researchers.

The conference is unique in some of its informal rules: No registration fee, no copyright imposed on the papers (i.e. authors can present the same paper elsewhere) and no size limit on the papers.

What I hope to accomplish in this little corner devoted to FCRAR is to provide links to the various conference proceedings of past years and  post rare documents such as scans of the early years proceedings.

I’ll start with posting the FCRAR 2009 Proceedings which a few years ago mysteriously disappeared from the FAU College of Engineering web page.

FCRAR 2009 Proceedings (pdf). The last time that FAU hosted FCRAR was in 2017 (FCRAR 30). The link http://fcrar.fau.edu  gives access to the FCRAR 2017 proceedings (via clicking “For Authors”) and to many past FCRAR proceedings (via clicking “Past Conferences”.