The ongoing development of life support robots is presented by introducing the newly developed sharp ear robot ApriAlphaTM V3 and the person-following robot ApriAttendaTM from the viewpoint of human interfaces and mobile intelligence. In the future, by making full use of advanced network technology, home-use robots are expected to be at the core of home network systems and the widespread adoption of robots in everyday life is expected to be greatly facilitated by improvements in their working environment. Showing the concept of UDRobTM, the environmental design including objects should be considered from the perspectives of both robots and humans. To realize life support robots, it is important to demonstrate what the robot can do in terms of actual tasks. The authors believe intelligent robots are the next technology whose development will decisively change the way people live. Other important issues are standardization of the robot's interface and safety problem. The activities of RSi (Robot Service Initiative) contribute to the common interface of information service such as weather forecast or news for service providers (Narita, 2005). In the OMG (Object Management Group) meeting, such an interface is also discussed (Kotoku, 2005), (Mizukawa, 2005). On the safety problem, the discussion on safety is an ongoing topic from the Aichi Expo. These activities will be fruitful in near future.

In this chapter, the trunk-twistless walk of contact sport athletes was described from a motion measurement and the trunk-twistless walk was analyzed by using the mathematical model. The proposed optimal relative phase of the swing leg and the pelvic rotation was applied to the walk of humanoid HRP-2. The walking action including the momentum compensation was completed only by the lower body, so that the upper body DOF can be used for accomplishing a task. Using the proposed walk, the stance foot torque and the energy consumption were both reduced. The future work includes an evaluation of the energy efficiency of the trunk-twistless walk, both in humanoids and human. An optimization program for an efficient walking pattern should be investigated. The authors wish to thank Kenji Shirae and Atsutoshi Ikeda of Nara Institute of Science and Technology for the data processing required for this research.

Nowadays robotics is one of the most dynamic fields of scientific researches. The shift of robotics researches from manufacturing to services applications is clear. During the last decades interest in studying climbing and walking robots has been increased. This increasing interest has been in many areas that most important ones of them are: mechanics, electronics, medical engineering, cybernetics, controls, and computers. Today’s climbing and walking robots are a combination of manipulative, perceptive, communicative, and cognitive abilities and they are capable of performing many tasks in industrial and non- industrial environments. Surveillance, planetary exploration, emergence rescue operations, reconnaissance, petrochemical applications, construction, entertainment, personal services, intervention in severe environments, transportation, medical and etc are some applications from a very diverse application fields of climbing and walking robots. By great progress in this area of robotics it is anticipated that next generation climbing and walking robots will enhance lives and will change the way the human works, thinks and makes decisions. This book presents the state of the art achievments, recent developments, applications and future challenges of climbing and walking robots. These are presented in 24 chapters by authors throughtot the world The book serves as a reference especially for the researchers who are interested in mobile robots. It also is useful for industrial engineers and graduate students in advanced study.