Recently there has been much attention paid to the explosion of the Internet and applications driven by it. Yet little has changed in the way people interact with computers. The availability of ubiquitous computing infrastructure makes possible many new ways to connect information infrastructure with the physical world and the people in it. Robotics contains the science and tools to do this. The face of computing has changed greatly in the last 10 years and will continue to do so. One of the most important changes in future will be the migration of the computer from the desktop ``into the real world'', i.e. into a variety of other workplace tasks. But without the keyboard and screen, computers must rely on their own sensing and actuation to be useful. So this migration will require a concerted effort by robotics researchers to develop the sensing and action ``skills'' needed for those workplace tasks.
This workshop ties together current and emerging areas of robotics and outside areas which study similar problems. The ``personal robotics'' themes underlines the importance of understanding human tasks and how they might be supported through robotic and computer technology. Personal robotics tasks are often simplified by the presence of the human-in-the-loop, and the skills needed by the robot are complementary rather than competitive with, human skills.