Self-organizing approaches inspired from biological systems, such as social insects, genetic, molecular and cellular systems under morphogenesis, and human mental development, has enjoyed great success in advanced robotic systems that need to work in dynamic and changing environments. Compared with classical control methods for robotic systems, the major advantages of bio-inspired self-organizing robotic systems include robustness, self-repair and self-healing in the presence of system failures and/or malfunctions, high adaptability to environmental changes, and autonomous self-organization and self-reconfiguration without a centralized control. "Bio-inspired Self-organizing Robotic Systems" provides a valuable reference for scientists, practitioners and research students working on developing control algorithms for self-organizing engineered collective systems, such as swarm robotic systems, self-reconfigurable modular robots, smart material based robotic devices, unmanned aerial vehicles, and satellite constellations.

This book gathers selected research papers presented at the International Conference on Power, Control and Communication Infrastructure 2019 (ICPCCI 2019), organized by the Institute of Infrastructure, Technology, Research and Management (IITRAM), Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, on July 4-5, 2019. It presents the latest advances, trends and challenges in control system technologies and infrastructures. The book addresses a range of solutions to the problems faced by engineers and researchers to design and develop controllers for emerging areas like smart grid, integration of renewable energy, automated highway systems, haptics, unmanned aerial vehicles, sensor networks, robotics, formation control and many more. The solutions discussed in this book encourage and inspire researchers, industry professionals and policymakers to put these methods into practice.

This book introduces readers to essential technology assessment and forecasting tools, demonstrating their use on the basis of multiple cases. As organizations in the high-tech industry need to be able to assess emerging technologies, the book presents cases in which formal decision-making models are developed, providing a framework for decision-making in the context of technology acquisition and development. Applications of different technology forecasting tools are also discussed for a range of technologies and sectors, providing a guide to keep R&D organizations abreast of technological trends that affect their business. As such, the book offers a valuable the theoretical and practical reference guide for R&D managers responsible for emerging and future technologies.

This monograph presents an updated source of information on the state of the art in advanced control of articulated and mobile robots. It includes relevant selected problems dealing with enhanced actuation, motion planning and control functions for articulated robots, as well as of sensory and autonomous decision capabilities for mobile robots. The basic idea behind the book is to provide a larger community of robotic researchers and developers with a reliable source of information and innovative applications in the field of control of cooperating and mobile robots. This book is the outcome of the research project MISTRAL (Methodologies and Integration of Subsystems and Technologies for Anthropic Robotics and Locomotion) funded in 2001-2002 by the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research. The thorough discussion, rigorous treatment, and wide span of the presented work reveal the significant advances in the theoretical foundation and technology basis of the robotics field worldwide.

Written by leading researchers, this book collects a number of articles considering the problems of finite-precision computing in digital controllers and filters. Topics range from analysis of fragility and finite-precision effects to the design of low-complexity digital controllers.

In the last decade, signi?cant changes have occurred in the ?eld of vehicle motion planning, and for UAVs in particular. UAV motion planning is especially dif?cult due to several complexities not considered by earlier planning strategies: the - creased importance of differential constraints, atmospheric turbulence which makes it impossible to follow a pre-computed plan precisely, uncertainty in the vehicle state, and limited knowledge about the environment due to limited sensor capabilities. These differences have motivated the increased use of feedback and other control engineering techniques for motion planning. The lack of exact algorithms for these problems and dif?culty inherent in characterizing approximation algorithms makes it impractical to determine algorithm time complexity, completeness, and even soundness. This gap has not yet been addressed by statistical characterization of experimental performance of algorithms and benchmarking. Because of this overall lack of knowledge, it is dif?cult to design a guidance system, let alone choose the algorithm. Throughout this paper we keep in mind some of the general characteristics and requirements pertaining to UAVs. A UAV is typically modeled as having velocity and acceleration constraints (and potentially the higher-order differential constraints associated with the equations of motion), and the objective is to guide the vehicle towards a goal through an obstacle ?eld. A UAV guidance problem is typically characterized by a three-dimensional problem space, limited information about the environment, on-board sensors with limited range, speed and acceleration constraints, and uncertainty in vehicle state and sensor data.

This Proceedings Volume documents recent cutting-edge developments in multi-robot systems research and is the result of the Second International Workshop on Multi-Robot Systems that was held in March 2003 at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. This Workshop brought together top researchers working in areas relevant to designing teams of autonomous vehicles, including robots and unmanned ground, air, surface, and undersea vehicles. The workshop focused on the challenging issues of team architectures, vehicle learning and adaptation, heterogeneous group control and cooperation, task selection, dynamic autonomy, mixed initiative, and human and robot team interaction. A broad range of applications of this technology are presented in this volume, including UCAVS (Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles), micro-air vehicles, UUVs (Unmanned Underwater Vehicles), UGVs (Unmanned Ground Vehicles), planetary exploration, assembly in space, clean-up, and urban search and rescue.

This Proceedings Volume represents the contributions of the top researchers in this field and serves as a valuable tool for professionals in this interdisciplinary field.

The chapters in this volume, and the volume itself, celebrate the life and research of Roberto Tempo, a leader in the study of complex networked systems, their analysis and control under uncertainty, and robust designs. Contributors include authorities on uncertainty in systems, robustness, networked and network systems, social networks, distributed and randomized algorithms, and multi-agent systems-all fields that Roberto Tempo made vital contributions to. Additionally, at least one author of each chapter was a research collaborator of Roberto Tempo's. This volume is structured in three parts. The first covers robustness and includes topics like time-invariant uncertainties, robust static output feedback design, and the uncertainty quartet. The second part is focused on randomization and probabilistic methods, which covers topics such as compressive sensing, and stochastic optimization. Finally, the third part deals with distributed systems and algorithms, and explores matters involving mathematical sociology, fault diagnoses, and PageRank computation. Each chapter presents exposition, provides new results, and identifies fruitful future directions in research. This book will serve as a valuable reference volume to researchers interested in uncertainty, complexity, robustness, optimization, algorithms, and networked systems.

This book tackles all the stages and mechanisms involved in the learning of manipulation tasks by bimanual robots in unstructured settings, as it can be the task of folding clothes. The first part describes how to build an integrated system, capable of properly handling the kinematics and dynamics of the robot along the learning process. It proposes practical enhancements to closed-loop inverse kinematics for redundant robots, a procedure to position the two arms to maximize workspace manipulability, and a dynamic model together with a disturbance observer to achieve compliant control and safe robot behavior. In the second part, methods for robot motion learning based on movement primitives and direct policy search algorithms are presented. To improve sampling efficiency and accelerate learning without deteriorating solution quality, techniques for dimensionality reduction, for exploiting low-performing samples, and for contextualization and adaptability to changing situations are proposed. In sum, the reader will find in this comprehensive exposition the relevant knowledge in different areas required to build a complete framework for model-free, compliant, coordinated robot motion learning.

This book is an up-to-date self-contained compendium of the research carried out by the authors on model-based diagnosis of a class of discrete-event systems called active systems. After defining the diagnosis problem, the book copes with a variety of reasoning mechanisms that generate the diagnosis, possibly within a monitoring setting. The book is structured into twelve chapters, each of which has its own introduction and concludes with bibliographic notes and itemized summaries. Concepts and techniques are presented with the help of numerous examples, figures, and tables, and when appropriate these concepts are formalized into propositions and theorems, while detailed algorithms are expressed in pseudocode. This work is primarily intended for researchers, professionals, and graduate students in the fields of artificial intelligence and control theory.

This book gathers extended versions of the best papers presented at the 8th IEEE conference on Intelligent Systems, held in Sofia, Bulgaria on September 4-6, 2016, which are mainly related to theoretical research in the area of intelligent systems. The main focus is on novel developments in fuzzy and intuitionistic fuzzy sets, the mathematical modelling tool of generalized nets and the newly defined method of intercriteria analysis. The papers reflect a broad and diverse team of authors, including many young researchers from Australia, Bulgaria, China, the Czech Republic, Iran, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, South Korea and the UK.

The term "haptics" refers to the science of sensing and manipulation through touch. Multiple disciplines such as biomechanics, psychophysics, robotics, neuroscience, and software engineering converge to support haptics, and generally, haptic research is done by three communities: the robotics community, the human computer interface community, and the virtual reality community.

This book is different from any other book that has looked at haptics. The authors treat haptics as a new medium rather than just a domain within one of the above areas. They describe human haptic perception and interfaces and present fundamentals in haptic rendering and modeling in virtual environments. Diverse software architectures for standalone and networked haptic systems are explained, and the authors demonstrate the vast application spectrum of this emerging technology along with its accompanying trends. The primary objective is to provide a comprehensive overview and a practical understanding of haptic technologies. An appreciation of the close relationship between the wide range of disciplines that constitute a haptic system is a key principle towards being able to build successful collaborative haptic environments.

Structured as a reference to allow for fast accommodation of the issues concerned, this book is intended for researchers interested in studying touch and force feedback for use in technological multimedia systems in computer science, electrical engineering, or other related disciplines. With its novel approach, it paves the way for exploring research trends and challenges in such fields as interpersonal communication, games, or military applications.

The ?rst International Meeting of Advances in Robot Kinematics, ARK, occurred in September 1988, by invitation to Ljubljana, Slovenia, of a group of 20 int- nationally recognized researchers, representing six different countries from three continents. There were 22 lectures and approximately 150 attendees. This success of bringing together excellent research and the international community, led to the formation of a Scienti?c Committee and the decision to repeat the event biannually. The meeting was made open to all individuals with a critical peer review process of submitted papers. The meetings have since been continuously supported by the Jozef ? Stefan Institute and since 1992 have come under patronage of the Inter- tionalFederationforthePromotionofMechanismandMachineScience(IFToMM). Springer published the ?rst book of the series in 1991 and since 1994 Kluwer and Springer have published a book of the presented papers every two years. The papers in this book present the latest topics and methods in the kinem- ics, control and design of robotic manipulators. They consider the full range of - botic systems, including serial, parallel and cable driven manipulators, both planar and spatial. The systems range from being less than fully mobile to kinematically redundant to overconstrained. The meeting included recent advances in emerging areas such as the design and control of humanoids and humanoid subsystems, the analysis, modeling and simulation of human body motion, the mobility analysis of protein molecules and the development of systems which integrate man and - chine.

Fault-tolerant control aims at a gradual shutdown response in automated systems when faults occur. It satisfies the industrial demand for enhanced availability and safety, in contrast to traditional reactions to faults, which bring about sudden shutdowns and loss of availability. The book presents effective model-based analysis and design methods for fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control. Architectural and structural models are used to analyse the propagation of the fault through the process, to test the fault detectability and to find the redundancies in the process that can be used to ensure fault tolerance. It also introduces design methods suitable for diagnostic systems and fault-tolerant controllers for continuous processes that are described by analytical models of discrete-event systems represented by automata. The book is suitable for engineering students, engineers in industry and researchers who wish to get an overview of the variety of approaches to process diagnosis and fault-tolerant control. The authors have extensive teaching experience with graduate and PhD students, as well as with industrial experts. Parts of this book have been used in courses for this audience. The authors give a comprehensive introduction to the main ideas of diagnosis and fault-tolerant control and present some of their most recent research achievements obtained together with their research groups in a close cooperation with European research projects. The third edition resulted from a major re-structuring and re-writing of the former edition, which has been used for a decade by numerous research groups. New material includes distributed diagnosis of continuous and discrete-event systems, methods for reconfigurability analysis, and extensions of the structural methods towards fault-tolerant control. The bibliographical notes at the end of all chapters have been up-dated. The chapters end with exercises to be used in lectures.

This book presents an authoritative collection of contributions by researchers from 16 different countries (Austria, Chile, Georgia, Germany, Mexico, Norway, P.R. of China, Poland, North Macedonia, Romania, Russia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and United States) that report on recent developments and new directions in advanced control systems, together with new theoretical findings, industrial applications and case studies on complex engineering systems. This book is dedicated to Professor Vsevolod Mykhailovych Kuntsevich, an Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and President of the National Committee of the Ukrainian Association on Automatic Control, in recognition of his pioneering works, his great scientific and scholarly achievements, and his years of service to many scientific and professional communities, notably those involved in automation, cybernetics, control, management and, more specifically, the fundamentals and applications of tools and techniques for dealing with uncertain information, robustness, non-linearity, extremal systems, discrete control systems, adaptive control systems and others. Covering essential theories, methods and new challenges in control systems design, the book is not only a timely reference guide but also a source of new ideas and inspirations for graduate students and researchers alike. Its 15 chapters are grouped into four sections: (a) fundamental theoretical issues in complex engineering systems, (b) artificial intelligence and soft computing for control and decision-making systems, (c) advanced control techniques for industrial and collaborative automation, and (d) modern applications for management and information processing in complex systems. All chapters are intended to provide an easy-to-follow introduction to the topics addressed, including the most relevant references. At the same time, they reflect various aspects of the latest research work being conducted around the world and, therefore, provide information on the state of the art.

This book surveys the well-known results and also presents a series of original results on the mathematical modeling of social networks, focusing on models of informational influence, control and confrontation. Online social networks are intended for communication, opinion exchange and information acquisition for their members, but recently, online social networks have been intensively used as the objects and means of informational control and an arena of informational confrontation. They have become a powerful informational influence tool, particularly for the manipulation of individuals, social groups and society as a whole, as well as a battlefield of information warfare (cyberwars). This book aimed at under- and postgraduate university students as well as experts in information technology and modeling of social systems and processes.

The book covers four research domains representing a trend for modern manufacturing control: Holonic and Multi-agent technologies for industrial systems; Intelligent Product and Product-driven Automation; Service Orientation of Enterprise s strategic and technical processes; and Distributed Intelligent Automation Systems. These evolution lines have in common concepts related to "service orientation" derived from the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm.

The service-oriented multi-agent systems approach discussed in the book is characterized by the use of a set of distributed autonomous and cooperative agents, embedded in smart components that use the SOA principles, being oriented by offer and request of services, in order to fulfil production systems and value chain goals.

A new integrated vision combining emergent technologies is offered, to create control structures with distributed intelligence supporting the vertical and horizontal enterprise integration and running in truly distributed and global working environments.

The service value creation model at enterprise level consists into using Service Component Architectures for business process applications, based on entities which handle services. In this componentization view, a service is a piece of software encapsulating the business/control logic or resource functionality of an entity that exhibits an individual competence and responds to a specific request to fulfil a local (product) or global (batch) objective.

The service value creation model at enterprise level consists into using Service Component Architectures for business process applications, based on entities which handle services. In this componentization view, a service is a piece of software encapsulating the business/control logic or resource functionality of an entity that exhibits an individual competence and responds to a specific request to fulfil a local (product) or global (batch) objective.

This book shows some contributions presented in the 2010 International Conference on Robotic Welding, Intelligence and Automation (RWIA 2010), Oct. 14-16, 2010, Shanghai, China.

Welding handicraft is one of the most primordial and traditional techniques, mainly by manpower and human experiences. Weld quality and efficiency are, therefore, straightly limited by the welder s skill. In the modern manufacturing, automatic and robotic welding is becoming an inevitable trend. In recent years, the intelligentized techniques for robotic welding have a great development. The current teaching play-back welding robot is not with real-time functions for sensing and adaptive control of weld process. Generally, the key technologies on Intelligentized welding robot and robotic welding process include computer visual and other information sensing, monitoring and real-time feedback control of weld penetration and pool shape and welding quality. Seam tracking is another key technology for welding robot system. Some applications on intelligentized robotic welding technology is also described in this book, it shows a great potential and promising prospect of artificial intelligent technologies in the welding manufacturing."

Safety in industrial process and production plants is a concern of rising importance, especially if people would be endangered by a catastrophic system failure. On the other hand, because the control devices which are now exploited to improve the overall performance of industrial processes include both sophisticated digital system design techniques and complex hardware (input-output sensors, actuators, components and processing units), there is an increased probability of failure. As a direct consequence of this, control systems must include automatic supervision of closed-loop operation to detect and isolate malfunctions as early as possible. One of the most promising methods for solving this problem is the "analytical redundancy" approach, in which residual signals are obtained. The basic idea consists of using an accurate model of the system to mimic the real process behaviour. If a fault occurs, the residual signal, i.e., the difference between real system and model behaviours, can be used to diagnose and isolate the malfunction. This book focuses on model identification oriented to the analytical approach of fault diagnosis and identification. The problem is treated in all its aspects covering: choice of model structure; parameter identification; residual generation; fault diagnosis and isolation. Sample case studies are used to demonstrate the application of these techniques. Model-based Fault Diagnosis in Dynamic Systems Using Identification Techniques will be of interest to researchers in control and fault identification. Industrial control engineers interested in applying the latest methods in fault diagnosis will benefit from the practical examples and case studies.

Fieldbus Technology (FT) is an enabling platform that is becoming the preferred choice for the next generation real-time automation and control solutions. This book incorporates a selection of research and development papers. Topics covered include: history and background, contemporary standards, underlying architecture, comparison between different Fieldbus systems, applications, latest innovations, new trends as well as issues such as compatibility, interoperability, and interchangeability.

Except from the Foreword
The stated aim of the book series "Capturing Intelligence" is to publish books on research from all disciplines dealing with and affecting the issue of understanding and reproducing intelligence artificial systems. Of course, much of the work done in the past decades in this area has been of a highly technical nature, varying from hardware design for robots, software design for intelligent agents, and formal logic for reasoning.
It is therefore very refreshing to see Information Flow and Knowledge Sharing. This is a courageous book indeed. It is not afraid to tackle the Big Issues: notions such as information, knowledge, information system, information flow, collaborative problem solving, and ontological reasoning. All of these notions are crucial to our understanding of intelligence and our building of intelligent artificial systems, but all too often, these Big Issues are hidden behind the curtains while the technical topics take center stage.
AI has a rich history of philosophical books that have chosen a non-standard structure and narrative. It is nice to see that the authors have succeeded into combining a non-standard approach to deep questions with a non-standard format, resulting in a highly interesting volume.
"Frank van Harmelen, Series Editor"
Excerpt from the Introduction
Our interest is to promote, through a better and deeper understanding of the notions of information and knowledge, a better and deeper critical understanding of information technology as situated in the full range of human activities, assuming as a principle that this range of activities cannot be properly appreciated when it is reduced to the simplifiedmeans-end schema proposed by Technology. We invite the reader to build his/her own points of view about these notions, considering our propositions as a starting point for a critical analysis and discussion of these points. With that, we believe we are contributing to a better understanding of the impact of technology - and particularly of Information Technology - in everyday life.
"Flavio Soares Correa da Silva, Jaume Agusti-Cullell"
*Bridges the gap between the technological and philosophical aspects of information technology
*Gives both professionals and academics a philosophical foundation of IT so they can better understand their own discliplines
*Sheds light on a part of IT which is often overshadowed by its technical counterparts

H-infinity engineering continues to establish itself as a discipline of applied mathematics. As such, this extensively illustrated monograph makes a significant application of H-infinity theory to electronic amplifier design, demonstrating how recent developments in H-infinity engineering equip amplifier designers with new tools and avenues for research.

The presentation, at the interface of applied mathematics and engineering, emphasizes how to (1) compute the best possible performance available from any matching circuits; (2) benchmark existing matching solutions; and (3) generalize results to multiple amplifiers. As the monograph develops, many research directions are pointed out for both disciplines. The physical meaning of a mathematical problem is made explicit for the mathematician, while circuit problems are presented in the H-infinity framework for the engineer. A final chapter organizes these research topics into a collection of open problems ranging from electrical engineering, numerical implementations, and generalizations to H-infinity theory.

Reviews different machine learning and deep learning techniques with a biomedical perspective Provides the relevant case studies that demonstrate applicability of different AI techniques Explain different kinds of inputs like various image modalities, biomedical signals types, etc. Covers the latest trends of AI-based biomedical domains including IoT, drug discovery, biomechanics, robotics, electronic health records, etc. Discusses the research challenges and opportunities in AI and biomedical domain

This book presents selected proceedings from the 22nd biennial IFIP conference on System Modeling and Optimization, held in Turin, Italy in July of 2005. This edition of the conference is dedicated to the achievements of Camillo Possio, who was killed sixty years ago during the last air raid over Turin.

System Modeling and Optimization covers optimization, oiptimization with PDE constraints, structural systems optimization, algorithms for linear and nonlinear programming, stochastic optimization, control and game theory, combinatorial and discrete optimization, identification and inverse problems, fault detection, shape identification, complex systems, stability and sensitivity analysis, neural networks, fractal and chaos, reliability, computational techniques in distributed systems and in information processing environments, transmission of information in complex systems, and database design.