It is well known that a large number of problems relevant to the control ?eld can be formulatedas optimizationproblems. For long time, the classical approachhas been to look for a closed form solution to the speci?c optimizationproblems at hand. The last decade has seen a noticeable shift in the meaning of "closed form" solution. The formidable increase of computationalpower has dramatically changed the fe- ing of theoreticians as well as of practitioners about what is meant by tractable and untractableproblems. A main issue regardsconvexity. From a theoretical viewpoint, there has been a...

Robots able to imitate human beings have been at the core of stories of science?ctionaswellasdreamsofinventorsforalongtime.Amongthe various skills that Mother Nature has provided us with and that often go forgotten, the ability of sight is certainly one of the most important. Perhaps inspired by tales of Isaac Asimov, comics and cartoons, and surely helped by the progress of electronics in recent decades, researchers have progressively made the dream of creating robots able to move and operate by exploiting arti?cial vision a concrete reality. Technically speaking, we would say that these...