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Autonomous Mobile Robots: Planning, Navigation, and Simulation presents detailed coverage of the domain of robotics in motion planning and associated topics in navigation. This book covers numerous base planning methods from diverse schools of learning, including deliberative planning methods, reactive planning methods, task planning methods, fusion of different methods, and cognitive architectures. It is a good resource for doing initial project work in robotics, providing an overview, methods and simulation software in one resource. For more advanced readers, it presents a variety of planning algorithms to choose from, presenting the tradeoffs between the algorithms to ascertain a good choice. Finally, the book presents fusion mechanisms to design hybrid algorithms. - Presents intuitive and practical coverage of all sub-problems of mobile robotics to enable easy comprehension of sophisticated modern-day robots - Covers a wide variety of motion planning algorithms, giving a near-exhaustive treatment of the domain with thought provoking comparisons between algorithms - Dives into detailed discussions on robot operating systems and other simulators to get hands-on knowledge without the need of in-house robots

This textbook presents a unique examination of mobile robots and autonomous vehicles using embedded systems, from introductory to advanced level. It is structured in four parts, dealing with Embedded Systems (processors, sensors, actuators, control, multitasking and communication), Robot Hardware (driving and walking robots, autonomous boats and planes, as well as robot manipulators), Robot Software (localization, navigation, image processing and automotive systems), and Artificial Intelligence (neural networks, genetic algorithms and deep learning). The book is organized for ease of use, with numerous figures, photographs, and worked example programs. The book is written as a text for courses in computer science, computer engineering, IT, electronics engineering, and mechatronics, as well as a guide for robot hobbyists and researchers. In this 4th edition the text has been thoroughly updated and extended. It now uses the Raspberry Pi and Arduino embedded processors for all mobile robot systems.

This book describes the design, mathematical modeling, control system development and experimental validation of a versatile mobile pipe inspection robot. It also discusses a versatile robotic system for pipeline inspection, together with an original, adaptable tracked mobile robot featuring a patented motion unit. Pipeline inspection is a common field of application for mobile robots because the monitoring of inaccessible, long and narrow pipelines is a very difficult task for humans. The main design objective is to minimize the number of robots needed to inspect different types of horizontal and vertical pipelines, with both smooth and rough surfaces. The book includes extensive information on the various design phases, mathematical modeling, simulations and control system development. In closing, the prototype construction process and testing procedures are presented and supplemented with laboratory and field experiments.

As technology continues to develop, certain innovations are beginning to cover a wide range of applications, specifically mobile robotic systems. The boundaries between the various automation methods and their implementations are not strictly defined, with overlaps occurring. Specificity is required regarding the research and development of android systems and how they pertain to modern science. Control and Signal Processing Applications for Mobile and Aerial Robotic Systems is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the current state of control and signal processing of portable robotic designs. While highlighting topics such as digital systems, control theory, and mathematical methods, this publication explores original inquiry contributions and the instrumentation of mechanical systems in the industrial and scientific fields. This book is ideally designed for technicians, engineers, industry specialists, researchers, academicians, and students seeking current research on today's execution of mobile robotic schemes.

The book describes an approach to the multi-agent systems (MAS) design for applications of robotic soccer in the MiroSot category. The described MAS is designed for dynamic, quickly changing environments, in which not only the actions of our MAS are observed, but also those of the opposing MAS. It actively tries to affect the environment to score goals faster than the opposing MAS. Multi-agent systems (MAS) are mostly applied in the environments in which they exist and act without an opposing system. The book also describes strategies based on a supervisor that makes decisions depending on behavior prediction of the opposing MAS and the ball movement in the working place. A sophisticated distribution of tasks was designed for each agent to cooperate in order score goals as fast as possible. Simultaneously, these agents try, by permitted means, to prevent the enemy agents from scoring goals. The approach described is an excellent guide to the constantly evolving abilities of mobile robotics, both for real-world applications, such as cooperation of multiple robots in life-saving activities, and for the steadily developing applications of mobile robots in various robotic competitions (e.g. Robocup, etc.). The book provides readers with high-level knowledge on how to design strategies and how to implement such systems, and the ideas presented enable them to further refine the approach utilizing the latest hardware and use it in new systems implementations of sophisticated intelligent engineering.

Wheeled Mobile Robotics: From Fundamentals Towards Autonomous Systemscovers the main topics from the wide area of mobile robotics, explaining all applied theory and application. The book gives the reader a good foundation, enabling them to continue to more advanced topics. Several examples are included for better understanding, many of them accompanied by short MATLAB® script code making it easy to reuse in practical work. The book includes several examples of discussed methods and projects for wheeled mobile robots and some advanced methods for their control and localization. It is an ideal resource for those seeking an understanding of robotics, mechanics, and control, and for engineers and researchers in industrial and other specialized research institutions in the field of wheeled mobile robotics. Beginners with basic math knowledge will benefit from the examples, and engineers with an understanding of basic system theory and control will find it easy to follow the more demanding fundamental parts and advanced methods explained. - Offers comprehensive coverage of the essentials of the field that are suitable for both academics and practitioners - Includes several examples of the application of algorithms in simulations and real laboratory projects - Presents foundation in mobile robotics theory before continuing with more advanced topics - Self-sufficient to beginner readers, covering all important topics in the mobile robotics field - Contains specific topics on modeling, control, sensing, path planning, localization, design architectures, and multi-agent systems

This book provides state-of-the-art scientific and engineering research findings and developments in the area of mobile robotics and associated support technologies around the theme of assistive robotics. The book contains peer reviewed articles presented at the CLAWAR 2015 conference. The book contains a comprehensive collection of papers on legged locomotion with numbers of legs from two upward to multi-legs, which includes robots cable of climbing walls, poles, or more complex structures such as continuing the distinctive CLAWAR themes. There are also a strong showing of articles covering human assist devices, notably exoskeletal and prosthetic devices, as well as social robots designed to meet the growing challenges of global ageing population.

This book provides readers with extensive information on path planning optimization for both single and multiple Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs), and discusses practical issues involved in advanced industrial applications of AGVs. After discussing previously published research in the field and highlighting the current gaps, it introduces new models developed by the authors with the goal of reducing costs and increasing productivity and effectiveness in the manufacturing industry. The new models address the increasing complexity of manufacturing networks, due for example to the adoption of flexible manufacturing systems that involve automated material handling systems, robots, numerically controlled machine tools, and automated inspection stations, while also considering the uncertainty and stochastic nature of automated equipment such as AGVs. The book discusses and provides solutions to important issues concerning the use of AGVs in the manufacturing industry, including material flow optimization with AGVs, programming manufacturing systems equipped with AGVs, reliability models, the reliability of AGVs, routing under uncertainty, and risks involved in AGV-based transportation. The clear style and straightforward descriptions of problems and their solutions make the book an excellent resource for graduate students. Moreover, thanks to its practice-oriented approach, the novelty of the findings and the contemporary topic it reports on, the book offers new stimulus for researchers and practitioners in the broad field of production engineering.

This book focuses on two challenges posed in robot control by the increasing adoption of robots in the everyday human environment: uncertainty and networked communication. Part I of the book describes learning control to address environmental uncertainty. Part II discusses state estimation, active sensing, and complex scenario perception to tackle sensing uncertainty. Part III completes the book with control of networked robots and multi-robot teams. Each chapter features in-depth technical coverage and case studies highlighting the applicability of the techniques, with real robots or in simulation. Platforms include mobile ground, aerial, and underwater robots, as well as humanoid robots and robot arms. Source code and experimental data are available at http://extras.springer.com. The text gathers contributions from academic and industry experts, and offers a valuable resource for researchers or graduate students in robot control and perception. It also benefits researchers in related areas, such as computer vision, nonlinear and learning control, and multi-agent systems.

“Autonomous manipulation” is a challenge in robotic technologies. It refers to the capability of a mobile robot system with one or more manipulators that performs intervention tasks requiring physical contacts in unstructured environments and without continuous human supervision. Achieving autonomous manipulation capability is a quantum leap in robotic technologies as it is currently beyond the state of the art in robotics.This book addresses issues with the complexity of the problems encountered in autonomous manipulation including representation and modeling of robotic structures, kinematic and dynamic robotic control, kinematic and algorithmic singularity avoidance, dynamic task priority, workspace optimization and environment perception. Further development in autonomous manipulation should be able to provide robust improvements of the solutions for all of the above issues. The book provides an extensive tract on sensory-based autonomous manipulation for intervention tasks in unstructured environments. After presenting the theoretical foundations for kinematic and dynamic modelling as well as task-priority based kinematic control of multi-body systems, the work is focused on one of the most advanced underwater vehicle-manipulator system, SAUVIM (Semi-Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for Intervention Missions). Solutions to the problem of target identification and localization are proposed, a number of significant case studies are discussed and practical examples and experimental/simulation results are presented. The book may inspire the robot research community to further investigate critical issues in autonomous manipulation and to develop robot systems that can profoundly impact our society for the better.

Vision-based control of wheeled mobile robots is an interesting field of research from a scientific and even social point of view due to its potential applicability. This book presents a formal treatment of some aspects of control theory applied to the problem of vision-based pose regulation of wheeled mobile robots. In this problem, the robot has to reach a desired position and orientation, which are specified by a target image. It is faced in such a way that vision and control are unified to achieve stability of the closed loop, a large region of convergence, without local minima and good robustness against parametric uncertainty. Three different control schemes that rely on monocular vision as unique sensor are presented and evaluated experimentally. A common benefit of these approaches is that they are valid for imaging systems obeying approximately a central projection model, e.g., conventional cameras, catadioptric systems and some fisheye cameras. Thus, the presented control schemes are generic approaches. A minimum set of visual measurements, integrated in adequate task functions, are taken from a geometric constraint imposed between corresponding image features. Particularly, the epipolar geometry and the trifocal tensor are exploited since they can be used for generic scenes. A detailed experimental evaluation is presented for each control scheme.

Snake Robots is a novel treatment of theoretical and practical topics related to snake robots: robotic mechanisms designed to move like biological snakes and able to operate in challenging environments in which human presence is either undesirable or impossible. Future applications of such robots include search and rescue, inspection and maintenance, and subsea operations. Locomotion in unstructured environments is a focus for this book. The text targets the disparate muddle of approaches to modelling, development and control of snake robots in current literature, giving a unified presentation of recent research results on snake robot locomotion to increase the reader's basic understanding of these mechanisms and their motion dynamics and clarify the state of the art in the field. The book is a complete treatment of snake robotics, with topics ranging from mathematical modelling techniques, through mechatronic design and implementation, to control design strategies. The development of two snake robots is described and both are used to provide experimental validation of many of the theoretical results. Snake Robots is written in a clear and easily understandable manner which makes the material accessible by specialists in the field and non-experts alike. Numerous illustrative figures and images help readers to visualize the material. The book is particularly useful to new researchers taking on a topic related to snake robots because it provides an extensive overview of the snake robot literature and also represents a suitable starting point for research in this area.

In the past decade a critical mass of work that uses fuzzy logic for autonomous vehicle navigation has been reported. Unfortunately, reports of this work are scattered among conference, workshop, and journal publications that belong to different research communities (fuzzy logic, robotics, artificial intelligence, intelligent control) and it is therefore not easily accessible either to the new­ comer or to the specialist. As a result, researchers in this area may end up reinventing things while being unaware of important existing work. We believe that research and applications based on fuzzy logic in the field of autonomous vehicle navigation have now reached a sufficient level of maturity, and that it should be suitably reported to the largest possible group of interested practitioners, researches, and students. On these grounds, we have endeavored to collect some of the most representative pieces of work in one volume to be used as a reference. Our aim was to provide a volume which is more than'yet another random collection of papers,'and gives the reader some added value with respect to the individual papers. In order to achieve this goal we have aimed at: • Selecting contributions which are representative of a wide range of prob­ lems and solutions and which have been validated on real robots; and • Setting the individual contributions in a clear framework, that identifies the main problems of autonomous robotics for which solutions based on fuzzy logic have been proposed.

As research progresses, it enables multi-robot systems to be used in more and more complex and dynamic scenarios. Hence, the question arises how different modelling and reasoning paradigms can be utilised to describe the intended behaviour of a team and execute it in a robust and adaptive manner. Hendrik Skubch presents a solution, ALICA (A Language for Interactive Cooperative Agents) which combines modelling techniques drawn from different paradigms in an integrative fashion. Hierarchies of finite state machines are used to structure the behaviour of the team such that temporal and causal relationships can be expressed. Utility functions weigh different options against each other and assign agents to different tasks. Finally, non-linear constraint satisfaction and optimisation problems are integrated, allowing for complex cooperative behaviour to be specified in a concise, theoretically well-founded manner.

This monograph is devoted to the theory and development of autonomous navigation of mobile robots using computer vision based sensing mechanism. The conventional robot navigation systems, utilizing traditional sensors like ultrasonic, IR, GPS, laser sensors etc., suffer several drawbacks related to either the physical limitations of the sensor or incur high cost. Vision sensing has emerged as a popular alternative where cameras can be used to reduce the overall cost, maintaining high degree of intelligence, flexibility and robustness.This book includes a detailed description of several new approaches for real life vision based autonomous navigation algorithms and SLAM. It presents the concept of how subgoal based goal-driven navigation can be carried out using vision sensing. The development concept of vision based robots for path/line tracking using fuzzy logic is presented, as well as how a low-cost robot can be indigenously developed in the laboratory with microcontroller based sensor systems. The book describes successful implementation of integration of low-cost, external peripherals, with off-the-shelf procured robots. An important highlight of the book is that it presents a detailed, step-by-step sample demonstration of how vision-based navigation modules can be actually implemented in real life, under 32-bit Windows environment. The book also discusses the concept of implementing vision based SLAM employing a two camera based system.

There is a growing social interest in developing vision-based vehicle guidance systems for improving traffic safety and efficiency and the environment. Ex­ amples of vision-based vehicle guidance systems include collision warning systems, steering control systems for tracking painted lane marks, and speed control systems for preventing rear-end collisions. Like other guidance systems for aircraft and trains, these systems are ex­ pected to increase traffic safety significantly. For example, safety improve­ ments of aircraft landing processes after the introduction of automatic guidance systems have been reported to be 100 times better than prior to installment. Although the safety of human lives is beyond price, the cost for automatic guidance could be compensated by decreased insurance costs. It is becoming more important to increase traffic safety by decreasing the human driver's load in our society, especially with an increasing population of senior people who continue to drive. The second potential social benefit is the improvement of traffic efficiency by decreasing the spacing between vehicles without sacrificing safety. It is reported, for example, that four times the efficiency is expected if the spacing between cars is controlled automatically at 90 cm with a speed of 100 kmjh compared to today's typical manual driving. Although there are a lot of tech­ nical, psychological, and social issues to be solved before realizing the high­ density jhigh-speed traffic systems described here, highly efficient highways are becoming more important because of increasing traffic congestion.

Autonomous robot vehicles are vehicles capable of intelligent motion and action without requiring either a guide or teleoperator control. The recent surge of interest in this subject will grow even grow further as their potential applications increase. Autonomous vehicles are currently being studied for use as reconnaissance/exploratory vehicles for planetary exploration, undersea, land and air environments, remote repair and maintenance, material handling systems for offices and factories, and even intelligent wheelchairs for the disabled. This reference is the first to deal directly with the unique and fundamental problems and recent progress associated with autonomous vehicles. The editors have assembled and combined significant material from a multitude of sources, and, in effect, now conviniently provide a coherent organization to a previously scattered and ill-defined field.

During the last decade, many researchers have dedicated their efforts to constructing revolutionary machines and to providing them with forms of artificial intelligence to perform some of the most hazardous, risky or monotonous tasks historically assigned to human beings. Among those machines, mobile robots are undoubtedly at the cutting edge of current research directions. A rough classification of mobile robots can be considered: on the one hand, mobile robots oriented to human-made indoor environments; on the other hand, mobile robots oriented to unstructured outdoor environments, which could include flying oriented robots, space-oriented robots and underwater robots. The most common motion mechanism for surface mobile robots is the wheel-based mechanism, adapted both to flat surfaces, found in human-made environments, and to rough terrain, found in outdoor environments. However, some researchers have reported successful developments with leg-based mobile robots capable of climbing up stairs, although they require further investigation. The research work presented here focuses on wheel-based mobile robots that navigate in human-made indoor environments. The main problems described throughout this book are: Representation and integration of uncertain geometric information by means of the Symmetries and Perturbations Model (SPmodel). This model combines the use of probability theory to represent the imprecision in the location of a geometric element, and the theory of symmetries to represent the partiality due to characteristics of each type of geometric element. A solution to the first location problem, that is, the computation of an estimation for the mobile robot location when the vehicle is completely lost in the environment. The problem is formulated as a search in an interpretation tree using efficient matching algorithms and geometric constraints to reduce the size of the solution space. The book proposes a new probabilistic framework adapted to the problem of simultaneous localization and map building for mobile robots: the Symmetries and Perturbations Map (SPmap). This framework has been experimentally validated by a complete experiment which profited from ground-truth to accurately validate the precision and the appropriateness of the approach. The book emphasizes the generality of the solutions proposed to the different problems and their independence with respect to the exteroceptive sensors mounted on the mobile robot. Theoretical results are complemented by real experiments, where the use of multisensor-based approaches is highlighted.

This monograph is a revised version of the D.Phil. thesis of the first author, submitted in October 1990 to the University of Oxford. This work investigates the problem of mobile robot navigation using sonar. We view model-based navigation as a process of tracking naturally occurring environment features, which we refer to as'targets'. Targets that have been predicted from the environment map are tracked to provide that are observed, but not predicted, vehicle position estimates. Targets represent unknown environment features or obstacles, and cause new tracks to be initiated, classified, and ultimately integrated into the map. Chapter 1 presents a brief definition of the problem and a discussion of the basic research issues involved. No attempt is made to survey ex­ haustively the mobile robot navigation literature-the reader is strongly encouraged to consult other sources. The recent collection edited by Cox and Wilfong [34] is an excellent starting point, as it contains many of the standard works of the field. Also, we assume familiarity with the Kalman filter. There are many well-known texts on the subject; our notation derives from Bar-Shalom and Fortmann [7]. Chapter 2 provides a detailed sonar sensor model. A good sensor model of our approach to navigation, and is used both for is a crucial component predicting expected observations and classifying unexpected observations.

Dynamic modeling is the fundamental building block for mechanism analysis, design, control and performance evaluation. One class of mechanism, legged machines, have multiple closed-chains established through intermittent ground contacts. Further, walking on natural terrain introduces nonlinear system compliance in the forms of foot sinkage and slippage. Closed-chains constrain the possible motions of a mechanism while compliances affect the redistribution of forces throughout the system. A General Model of Legged Locomotion on Natural Terrain develops a dynamic mechanism model that characterizes indeterminate interactions of a closed-chain robot with its environment. The approach is applicable to any closed-chain mechanism with sufficient contact compliance, although legged locomotion on natural terrain is chosen to illustrate the methodology. The modeling and solution procedures are general to all walking machine configurations, including bipeds, quadrupeds, beam-walkers and hopping machines. This work develops a functional model of legged locomotion that incorporates, for the first time, non-conservative foot-soil interactions in a nonlinear dynamic formulation. The model was applied to a prototype walking machine, and simulations generated significant insights into walking machine performance on natural terrain. The simulations are original and essential contributions to the design, evaluation and control of these complex robot systems. While posed in the context of walking machines, the approach has wider applicability to rolling locomotors, cooperating manipulators, multi-fingered hands, and prehensile agents.

Dean Pomerleau's trainable road tracker, ALVINN, is arguably the world's most famous neural net application. It currently holds the world's record for distance traveled by an autonomous robot without interruption: 21.2 miles along a highway, in traffic, at speedsofup to 55 miles per hour. Pomerleau's work has received worldwide attention, including articles in Business Week (March 2, 1992), Discover (July, 1992), and German and Japanese science magazines. It has been featured in two PBS series,'The Machine That Changed the World'and'By the Year 2000,'and appeared in news segments on CNN, the Canadian news and entertainment program'Live It Up', and the Danish science program'Chaos'. What makes ALVINN especially appealing is that it does not merely drive - it learns to drive, by watching a human driver for roughly five minutes. The training inputstothe neural networkare a video imageoftheroad ahead and thecurrentposition of the steering wheel. ALVINN has learned to drive on single lane, multi-lane, and unpaved roads. It rapidly adapts to other sensors: it learned to drive at night using laser reflectance imaging, and by using a laser rangefinder it learned to swerve to avoid obstacles and maintain a fixed distance from a row of parked cars. It has even learned to drive backwards.

Nowadays, multiple attention have been paid on a robot working in the human living environment, such as in the field of medical, welfare, entertainment and so on. Various types of researches are being conducted actively in a variety of fields such as artificial intelligence, cognitive engineering, sensor- technology, interfaces and motion control. In the future, it is expected to realize super high functional human-like robot by integrating technologies in various fields including these types of researches. The book represents new developments and advances in the field of bio-inspired robotics research introducing the state of the art, the idea of multi-locomotion robotic system to implement the diversity of animal motion. It covers theoretical and computational aspects of Passive Dynamic Autonomous Control (PDAC), robot motion control, multi legged walking and climbing as well as brachiation focusing concrete robot systems, components and applications. In addition, gorilla type robot systems are described as hardware of Multi-Locomotion Robotic system. It is useful for students and researchers in the field of robotics in general, bio-inspired robots, multi-modal locomotion, legged walking, motion control, and humanoid robots. Furthermore, it is also of interest for lecturers and engineers in practice building systems cooperating with humans.

The increasing presence of mobile robots in our everyday lives introduces the requirements for their intelligent and autonomous features. Therefore the next generation of mobile robots should be more self-capable, in respect to: increasing of their functionality in unforeseen situations, decreasing of the human involvement in their everyday operations and their maintenance; being robust; fault tolerant and reliable in their operation.Although mobile robotic systems have been a topic of research for decades and aside the technology improvements nowadays, the subject on how to program and making them more autonomous in their operations is still an open field for research.Applying bio-inspired, organic approaches in robotics domain is one of the methodologies that are considered that would help on making the robots more autonomous and self-capable, i.e. having properties such as: self-reconfiguration, self-adaptation, self-optimization, etc.In this book several novel biologically inspired approaches for walking robots (multi-legged and humanoid) domain are introduced and elaborated. They are related to self-organized and self-stabilized robot walking, anomaly detection within robot systems using self-adaptation, and mitigating the faulty robot conditions by self-reconfiguration of a multi-legged walking robot. The approaches presented have been practically evaluated in various test scenarios, the results from the experiments are discussed in details and their practical usefulness is validated.

The second edition of a comprehensive introduction to all aspects of mobile robotics, from algorithms to mechanisms.Mobile robots range from the Mars Pathfinder mission's teleoperated Sojourner to the cleaning robots in the Paris Metro. This text offers students and other interested readers an introduction to the fundamentals of mobile robotics, spanning the mechanical, motor, sensory, perceptual, and cognitive layers the field comprises. The text focuses on mobility itself, offering an overview of the mechanisms that allow a mobile robot to move through a real world environment to perform its tasks, including locomotion, sensing, localization, and motion planning. It synthesizes material from such fields as kinematics, control theory, signal analysis, computer vision, information theory, artificial intelligence, and probability theory. The book presents the techniques and technology that enable mobility in a series of interacting modules. Each chapter treats a different aspect of mobility, as the book moves from low-level to high-level details. It covers all aspects of mobile robotics, including software and hardware design considerations, related technologies, and algorithmic techniques.This second edition has been revised and updated throughout, with 130 pages of new material on such topics as locomotion, perception, localization, and planning and navigation. Problem sets have been added at the end of each chapter. Bringing together all aspects of mobile robotics into one volume, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots can serve as a textbook or a working tool for beginning practitioners.Curriculum developed by Dr. Robert King, Colorado School of Mines, and Dr. James Conrad, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, to accompany the National Instruments LabVIEW Robotics Starter Kit, are available. Included are 13 (6 by Dr. King and 7 by Dr. Conrad) laboratory exercises for using the LabVIEW Robotics Starter Kit to teach mobile robotics concepts.

The monograph written by John Mullane, Ba-Ngu Vo, Martin Adams and Ba-Tuong Vo is devoted to the field of autonomous robot systems, which have been receiving a great deal of attention by the research community in the latest few years. The contents are focused on the problem of representing the environment and its uncertainty in terms of feature based maps. Random Finite Sets are adopted as the fundamental tool to represent a map, and a general framework is proposed for feature management, data association and state estimation. The approaches are tested in a number of experiments on both ground based and marine based facilities.

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a process where an autonomous vehicle builds a map of an unknown environment while concurrently generating an estimate for its location. This book is concerned with computationally efficient solutions to the large scale SLAM problems using exactly sparse Extended Information Filters (EIF).The invaluable book also provides a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the properties of the information matrix in EIF-based algorithms for SLAM. Three exactly sparse information filters for SLAM are described in detail, together with two efficient and exact methods for recovering the state vector and the covariance matrix. Proposed algorithms are extensively evaluated both in simulation and through experiments.

'Programming Mobile Robots with Aria and Player'provides a guide to creating object-oriented C++ programs for robots using the Player and Aria APIs within a Linux environment. The book is supported throughout with examples, diagrams, sample programs, and configuration files. MobileRobot's Pioneers are used as vehicles throughout the book, but most of the techniques and programs that are demonstrated for Player are applicable to the other makes and models that the API supports. In addition, the Aria section is also appropriate for other robots made by MobileRobots. The book discusses how to install the various pieces of software needed and also describes how to: configure robots; control robots remotely; program each individual sensor and actuator; and set up and control robots.'Programming Mobile Robots with Aria and Player'serves as a complete text for undergraduate and postgraduate robotics programming modules, and is also an invaluable reference source for students, teachers and researchers. Additional material for this book can be found at http://extras.springer.com.

During the last years there has been an increasing interest in the area of service robots. Under this category we find robots working in tasks such as elderly care, guiding, office and domestic assistance, inspection, and many more. Service robots usually work in indoor environments designed for humans, with offices and houses being some of the most typical examples. These environments are typically divided into places with different functionalities like corridors, rooms or doorways. The ability to learn such semantic categories from sensor data enables a mobile robot to extend its representation of the environment, and to improve its capabilities. As an example, natural language terms like corridor or room can be used to indicate the position of the robot in a more intuitive way when communicating with humans. This book presents several approaches to enable a mobile robot to categorize places in indoor environments. The categories are indicated by terms which represent the different regions in these environments. The objective of this work is to enable mobile robots to perceive the spatial divisions in indoor environments in a similar way as people do. This is an interesting step forward to the problem of moving the perception of robots closer to the perception of humans. Many approaches introduced in this book come from the area of pattern recognition and classification. The applied methods have been adapted to solve the specific problem of place recognition. In this regard, this work is a useful reference to students and researchers who want to introduce classification techniques to help solve similar problems in mobile robotics.

Flying insects are intelligent micromachines capable of exquisite maneuvers in unpredictable environments. Understanding these systems advances our knowledge of flight control, sensor suites, and unsteady aerodynamics, which is of crucial interest to engineers developing intelligent flying robots or micro air vehicles (MAVs). The insights we gain when synthesizing bioinspired systems can in turn benefit the fields of neurophysiology, ethology and zoology by providing real-life tests of the proposed models. This book was written by biologists and engineers leading the research in this crossdisciplinary field. It examines all aspects of the mechanics, technology and intelligence of insects and insectoids. After introductory-level overviews of flight control in insects, dedicated chapters focus on the development of autonomous flying systems using biological principles to sense their surroundings and autonomously navigate. A significant part of the book is dedicated to the mechanics and control of flapping wings both in insects and artificial systems. Finally hybrid locomotion, energy harvesting and manufacturing of small flying robots are covered. A particular feature of the book is the depth on realization topics such as control engineering, electronics, mechanics, optics, robotics and manufacturing. This book will be of interest to academic and industrial researchers engaged with theory and engineering in the domains of aerial robotics, artificial intelligence, and entomology.

This book covers the specific aspects of mechanics and control theory that are applied in terrestrial locomotion systems. In addition to the theoretical basics and applications, exercises are provided. The solutions can be found at'www.springer.com/978-3-540-88840-6'as well as on - video files regarding prototypes of wheeled and worm-like locomotion systems; - e-learning software on the mechanical background; - MAPLE and MATLAB programs for the dynamic simulation of locomotion systems.

By the dawn of the new millennium, robotics has undergone a major transformation in scope and dimensions. This expansion has been brought about by the maturity of the field and the advances in its related technologies. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics has been rapidly expanding into the challenges of the human world. The new generation of robots is expected to safely and dependably co-habitat with humans in homes, workplaces, and communities, providing support in services, entertainment, education, healthcare, manufacturing, and assistance. Beyond its impact on physical robots, the body of knowledge robotics has produced is revealing a much wider range of applications reaching across diverse research areas and scientific disciplines, such as: biomechanics, haptics, neurosciences, virtual simulation, animation, surgery, and sensor networks among others. In return, the challenges of the new emerging areas are proving an abundant source of stimulation and insights for the field of robotics. It is indeed at the intersection of disciplines that the most striking advances happen. The goal of the series of Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR) is to bring, in a timely fashion, the latest advances and developments in robotics on the basis of their significance and quality. It is our hope that the wider dissemination of research developments will stimulate more exchanges and collaborations among the research community and contribute to further advancement of this rapidly growing field.

Rough terrain robotics is a fast evolving field of research and a lot of effort is deployed towards enabling a greater level of autonomy for outdoor vehicles. This book demonstrates how the accuracy of 3D position tracking can be improved by considering rover locomotion in rough terrain as a holistic problem. Although the selection of appropriate sensors is crucial to accurately track the rover's position, it is not the only aspect to consider. Indeed, the use of an unadapted locomotion concept severely affects the signal to noise ratio of the sensors, which leads to poor motion estimates. In this work, a mechanical structure allowing smooth motion across obstacles with limited wheel slip is used. In particular, it enables the use of odometry and inertial sensors to improve the position estimation in rough terrain. A method for computing 3D motion increments based on the wheel encoders and chassis state sensors is developed. Because it accounts for the kinematics of the rover, this method provides better results than the standard approach. To further improve the accuracy of the position tracking and the rover's climbing performance, a controller minimizing wheel slip is developed. The algorithm runs online and can be adapted to any kind of passive wheeled rover. Finally, sensor fusion using 3D-Odometry, inertial sensors and visual motion estimation based on stereovision is presented. The experimental results demonstrate how each sensor contributes to increase the accuracy and robustness of the 3D position estimation.

This book focuses on the efficient performance of mobile robots through the use of multi-hierarchical symbolic representations of the environment. A mobile robot intended to perform deliberative actions must possess some symbolic representation of its workspace, but such representations of real environments usually become so large that should be conveniently arranged in order to facilitate and, in some cases, make possible their use. Apart from the drawback of dealing with large amounts of information, other problems stand out when using symbolic representations. One is keeping the model properly optimized with respect to the robot tasks while maintaining it coherent with reality. Another one is the creation (or modification) of symbols from sensorial data. This book addresses all these issues considering symbolic multi-hierarchical structures. Such structures, based on the concept of abstraction, allow a robot to speed up its operation in large environments. Practical solutions tested on real robots (for instance, a robotic wheelchair for elder people) are provided. The book is intended for PhD students and in general for robotics, computer science, and artificial intelligence researchers.

Walking is simple for most of us, but two-legged robots (bipeds) are often slow, complex, inefficient, heavy, and have robotic-looking motions. What makes human walking so graceful? Can this be replicated with human-like robots? Martijn Wisse and Richard Q. van der Linde provide a detailed description of their research on pneumatic biped robots at the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. The book covers the basic theory - passive dynamic walking - and explains the implementation of pneumatic McKibben muscles in a series of successful prototypes.

This monograph describes a new family of algorithms for the simultaneous localization and mapping problem in robotics (SLAM). SLAM addresses the problem of acquiring an environment map with a roving robot, while simultaneously localizing the robot relative to this map. This problem has received enormous attention in the robotics community in the past few years, reaching a peak of popularity on the occasion of the DARPA Grand Challenge in October 2005, which was won by the team headed by the authors. The FastSLAM family of algorithms applies particle filters to the SLAM Problem, which provides new insights into the data association problem that is paramount in SLAM. The FastSLAM-type algorithms have enabled robots to acquire maps of unprecedented size and accuracy, in a number of robot application domains and have been successfully applied in different dynamic environments, including the solution to the problem of people tracking.

Mobile robotics has until now focused on issues like design of controllers and robot hardware. It is now ready to embrace theoretical methods from dynamical systems theory, statistics and system identification to produce a formalized approach based on quantitative analyses and computer models of the interaction between robot, task and environment. This book is a step towards a theoretical understanding of the operation of autonomous mobile robots. It presents cutting-edge research on the application of chaos theory, parametric and non-parametric statistics and dynamical systems theory in this field. Practical examples and case studies show how robot behaviour can be logged, analysed, interpreted and modelled, aiding design of controllers, analysis of agent behaviour and verification of results. As the first book to apply advanced scientific methods to mobile robots it will interest researchers, lecturers and post-graduate students in robotics, artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

Legged robots have proven to be a promising locomotion system, capable of performing tasks that conventional vehicles cannot perform. Even more exc- ing is the fact that this is a rapidly developing?eld of study for researchers from a variety of disciplines. Over the past three decades, legged locomotion technology has been developed all over the world, resulting in the invention of many important new machines and methods. However, only a few books have been published on the subject of multi-legged robots. The main objective of this book was to explore some of the major issues that the authors have been analyzing over the past ten years. A second objective was to write a book that only encompasses quadruped locomotion, the?rst specialized book on this topic. The book is divided into two parts: Walking Measurements and Algorithms, and Control Techniques. The?rst part is devoted exclusively to the theoretical aspects of quadrupeds. The?rst chapter is an introduction to the historic development of multi-legged robots, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages, main features, and potential and actual applications, as well as discussing basic concepts and the trade-o? between quadrupeds and hexapods. Finally, new and traditional stability measurements and gait g- eration algorithms for quadrupeds are explained. The second part of the book deals with general design and control algorithms (kinematics and dynamics) and techniques aimed at improving the main features of robots, such as speed and ground detection, interfaces,etc.

Mobile Robotics: A Practical Introduction (2nd edition) is an excellent introduction to the foundations and methods used for designing completely autonomous mobile robots. A fascinating, cutting-edge, research topic, autonomous mobile robotics is now taught in more and more universities. In this book you are introduced to the fundamental concepts of this complex field via twelve detailed case studies that show how to build and program real working robots. Topics covered in clued learning, autonomous navigation in unmodified, noisy and unpredictable environments, and high fidelity robot simulation. This new edition has been updated to include a new chapter on novelty detection, and provides a very practical introduction to mobile robotics for a general scientific audience. It is essential reading for 2nd and 3rd year undergraduate students and postgraduate students studying robotics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and robot engineering. The update and overview of core concepts in mobile robotics will assist and encourage practitioners of the field and set challenges to explore new avenues of research in this exiting field. The author is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Essex.'A very fine overview over the relevant problems to be solved in the attempt to bring intelligence to a moving vehicle.'Professor Dr. Ewald von Puttkamer, University of Kaiserslautern'Case studies show ways of achieving an impressive repertoire of kinds of learned behaviour, navigation and map-building. The book is an admirable introduction to this modern approach to mobile robotics and certainly gives a great deal of food for thought. This is an important and though-provoking book.'Alex M. Andrew in Kybernetes Vol 29 No 4 and Robotica Vol 18

Rather than using traditional artificial intelligence techniques, which are ineffective when applied to the complexities of real-world robot navigaiton, Connell describes a methodology of reconstructing intelligent robots with distributed, multiagent control systems. After presenting this methodology, hte author describes a complex, robust, and successful application-a mobile robot'can collection machine'which operates in an unmodified offifce environment occupied by moving people.