This textbook provides a starter’s guide to VHDL. This book can be used in conjunction with a one-semester course in Digital Systems Design or on its own for designers who only need an introduction to the language. This book is designed to provide a bottoms-up approach to learning the VHDL language. This design supports a course in which foundational knowledge is covered before moving into advanced topics. However, this design also supports use as a reference manual.

The Seventh International Symposium of Robotics Research was held in Herrsching near Munich, Germany, from October 21 to 24, 1995, the first to be organized following the renewal undergone by the International Foundation of Robotics Research (IFRR) during the preceding Symposium (Hidden Valley, October 1993). A board of eighteen officers was appointed: Suguru Arimoto (Tokyo University) Ruzena Bajcsy (University of Pennsylvania) Robert Bolles (SRI International) Mike Brady (Oxford University) Paolo Dario (Pisa University, Italy) Joris De Schutter (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium) Olivier Faugeras (INRIA, France) Georges Giralt (LAAS-CNRS, Fra~ce), Secretary Gerd Hirzinger (DFVLR, Germany) Hirochika Inoue (Tokyo University), President-elect Ray Jarvis (Monash University, Australia) Takeo Kanade (Carnegie Mellon University) Hirofumi Miura (Tokyo University) Richard Paul (University of Pennsylvania), President Marc Raibert (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Bernie Roth (Stanford University) Yoshiaki Shirai (Osaka University) Tsuneo Yoshikawa (Kyoto University) It was our commitment to bring together active, leading robotics researchers from academia, government, and industry, with the ambitious objective to assess the state of Advanced Robotics and to discuss future research directions.

This book investigates three main characteristics of future urban energy system for buildings, including flexibility, resilience and optimization. It explores the energy flexibility by considering renewable energy integration with buildings, sector coupling, and energy trading in the local energy market. Energy resilience is addressed from aspects of future climate change, pandemic crisis, and operational uncertainties. Approaches for system design, dynamic pricing and advanced control are discussed for the optimization of urban energy system. Knowledge from this book contributes to the effective means in future urban energy paradigm to closely integrate multiple energy systems (i.e., distribution, mobility, production and storage) with different energy carriers (i.e., heat, electricity) in an optimal manner for energy use. It would facilitate the envision of next-generation urban energy systems, towards sustainability, resilience and prosperity.