Localization and Orientation in Biology and Engineering

The German Society of Cybernetics organizes international conferences on selected interdisciplinary topics in regular 3-year intervals. The aim of these meetings is to bring together scientists who work in quite different disciplines, but are confronted with related problems and use the same or similar approaches. The topic of the 1983 conference which was held on March 23-25 at the University of Tiibingen came from a typical field of research in which engineers, biologists, and phYSicists share a common interest. We do not want to discuss here in detail the common principles which are used by nature and by engineers to solve the problems associated with localization and orientation, since the reader will find enough examples in this volume. The question, however, whether the participants of such meetings can really profit from each other, deserves some further consid- eration. First, there is the difficulty of finding a common language. This still seems to be a problem, although in some fields the language of engineers and biologists has become very similar over the years, an impression we also gained during the conference. Most of the authors made a great ef- fort to use a vocabulary which is understandable to people outside their own field of research, but, admittedly, not all succeeded.