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.

This IMA Volume in Mathematics and its Applications ESSAYS ON MATHEMATICAL ROBOTICS is based on the proceedings of a workshop that was an integral part of the 1992-93 IMA program on "Control Theory." The workshop featured a mathematicalintroductionto kinematics and fine motion planning; dynam- ics and control of kinematically redundant robot arms including snake-like robots, multi-fingered robotic hands; methods of non-holonomic motion planning for space robots, multifingered robot hands and mobile robots; new techniques in analytical mechanics for writing the dynamics of com- plicated multi-body systems subject to constraints on angular momentum or other non-holonomic constraints. In addition to papers representing proceedings of the Workshop, this volume contains several longer papers surveying developments of the intervening years. We thank John Baillieul, Shankar S. Sastry, and Hector J. Sussmann for organizing the workshop and editing the proceedings. We also take this opportunity to thank the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office, whose financial support made the workshop possible. Avner Friedman Willard Miller, Jr.

This book is a timely report on current neurotechnology research. It presents a snapshot of the state of the art in the field, discusses current challenges and identifies new directions. The book includes a selection of extended and revised contributions presented at the 2nd International Congress on Neurotechnology, Electronics and Informatics (NEUROTECHNIX 2014), held October 25-26 in Rome, Italy. The chapters are varied: some report on novel theoretical methods for studying neuronal connectivity or neural system behaviour; others report on advanced technologies developed for similar purposes; while further contributions concern new engineering methods and technological tools supporting medical diagnosis and neurorehabilitation. All in all, this book provides graduate students, researchers and practitioners dealing with different aspects of neurotechnologies with a unified view of the field, thus fostering new ideas and research collaborations among groups from different disciplines.

Providing a wide variety of technologies for ensuring the safety and dependability of cyber-physical systems (CPS), this book offers a comprehensive introduction to the architecture-centric modeling, analysis, and verification of CPS. In particular, it focuses on model driven engineering methods including architecture description languages, virtual prototyping, and formal analysis methods. CPS are based on a new design paradigm intended to enable emerging software-intensive systems. Embedded computers and networks monitor and control the physical processes, usually with the help of feedback loops where physical processes affect computations and vice versa. The principal challenges in system design lie in this constant interaction of software, hardware and physics. Developing reliable CPS has become a critical issue for the industry and society, because many applications such as transportation, power distribution, medical equipment and tele-medicine are dependent on CPS. Safety and security requirements must be ensured by means of powerful validation tools. Satisfying such requirements, including quality of service, implies having formally proven the required properties of the system before it is deployed. The book is concerned with internationally standardized modeling languages such as AADL, SysML, and MARTE. As the effectiveness of the technologies is demonstrated with industrial sample cases from the automotive and aerospace sectors, links between the methods presented and industrial problems are clearly understandable. Each chapter is self-contained, addressing specific scientific or engineering problems, and identifying further issues. In closing, it includes perspectives on future directions in CPS design from an architecture analysis viewpoint.

The new technological advances opened widely the application field of robots. Robots are moving from the classical application scenario with structured industrial environments and tedious repetitive tasks to new application environments that require more interaction with the humans. It is in this context that the concept of Wearable Robots (WRs) has emerged. One of the most exciting and challenging aspects in the design of biomechatronics wearable robots is that the human takes a place in the design, this fact imposes several restrictions and requirements in the design of this sort of devices. The key distinctive aspect in wearable robots is their intrinsic dual cognitive and physical interaction with humans. The key role of a robot in a physical human robot interaction (pHRI) is the generation of supplementary forces to empower and overcome human physical limits. The crucial role of a cognitive human robot interaction (cHRI) is to make the human aware of the possibilities of the robot while allowing them to maintain control of the robot at all times. This book gives a general overview of the robotics exoskeletons and introduces the reader to this robotic field. Moreover, it describes the development of an upper limb exoskeleton for tremor suppression in order to illustrate the influence of a specific application in the designs decisions."

Legged robots are a promising locomotion system, capable of performing tasks that conventional vehicles cannot. Even more exciting is the fact that this is a rapidly developing field of study for researchers from a variety of disciplines. However, only a few books have been published on the subject of multi-legged robots. The main objective of this book is to describe some of the major control issues concerning walking robots that the authors have faced over the past 10 years. A second objective is to focus especially on very large hydraulically driven hexapod robot locomotion weighing more than 2,000 kg, making this the first specialized book on this topic. The 10 chapters of the book touch on diverse relevant topics such as design aspects, implementation issues, modeling for control, navigation and control, force and impedance control-based walking, fully autonomous walking, walking and working tasks of hexapod robots, and the future of walking robots. The construction machines of the future will very likely resemble hydraulically driven hexapod robots like the ones described in this book - no longer science fiction but now a reality.

This is a book written by leading experts in the fields of cyber-physical systems (CPS) and wireless sensor networks (WSN). This book describes how wireless sensor networking technologies can help in establishing and maintaining seamless communications between the physical and cyber systems to enable efficient, secure, reliable acquisition, management, and routing of data. Topics covered include: an introduction to WSN and CPS; integration issues and challenges between WSN and CPS; enabling CPS design architectures with WSN technologies; cyber security in CPS; data management in CPS with WSN; routing in WSN for CPS; resource management in CPS; mobile sensors in CPS; intelligent WSN in CPS; resilient WSN for CPS; case studies of integrated WSN and CPS; and medical CPS. All chapters of the book have been rigorously peer-reviewed. Cyber-Physical System Design with Sensor Networking Technologies is essential reading for researchers, advanced students and developers working in the areas of cyber-physical systems and sensor networks.

This thesis investigates the use of blade-pitch control and real-time wind measurements to reduce the structural loads on the rotors and blades of wind turbines. The first part of the thesis studies the main similarities between the various classes of current blade-pitch control strategies, which have to date remained overlooked by mainstream literature. It also investigates the feasibility of an estimator design that extracts the turbine tower motion signal from the blade load measurements. In turn, the second part of the thesis proposes a novel model predictive control layer in the control architecture that enables an existing controller to incorporate the upcoming wind information and constraint-handling features. This thesis provides essential clarifications of and systematic design guidelines for these topics, which can benefit the design of wind turbines and, it is hoped, inspire the development of more innovative mechanical load-reduction solutions in the field of wind energy.

This book introduces non-identifier-based adaptive control (with and without internal model) and its application to the current, speed and position control of mechatronic systems such as electrical synchronous machines, wind turbine systems, industrial servo systems, and rigid-link, revolute-joint robots. In mechatronics, there is often only rough knowledge of the system. Due to parameter uncertainties, nonlinearities and unknown disturbances, model-based control strategies can reach their performance or stability limits without iterative controller design and performance evaluation, or system identification and parameter estimation. The non-identifier-based adaptive control presented is an alternative that neither identifies the system nor estimates its parameters but ensures stability. The adaptive controllers are easy to implement, compensate for disturbances and are inherently robust to parameter uncertainties and nonlinearities. For controller implementation only structural system knowledge (like relative degree, input-to-state stable zero dynamics and known sign of the high-frequency gain) is required. Moreover, the presented controllers guarantee reference tracking with prescribed asymptotic or transient accuracy, i.e. the tracking error eventually tends to or for all time evolves within an a priori specified region. The book presents the theory, modeling and application in a general but detailed and self-contained manner, making it easy to read and understand, particularly for newcomers to the topics covered

This book, written by experts in the field, is based on the latest research on the analysis and synthesis of switched time-delay systems. It covers the stability, filtering, fault detection and control problems, which are studied using the average dwell time approach. It presents both the continuous-time and discrete-time systems and provides useful insights and methods, as well as practical algorithms that can be considered in other complex systems, such as neuron networks and genetic regulatory networks, making it a valuable resource for researchers, scientists and engineers in the field of system sciences and control communities.

It is man's ongoing hope that a machine could somehow adapt to its environment by reorganizing itself. This is what the notion of self-organizing robots is based on. The theme of this book is to examine the feasibility of creating such robots within the limitations of current mechanical engineering. The topics comprise the following aspects of such a pursuit: the philosophy of design of self-organizing mechanical systems; self-organization in biological systems; the history of self-organizing mechanical systems; a case study of a self-assembling/self-repairing system as an autonomous distributed system; a self-organizing robot that can create its own shape and robotic motion; implementation and instrumentation of self-organizing robots; and the future of self-organizing robots. All topics are illustrated with many up-to-date examples, including those from the authors' own work. The book does not require advanced knowledge of mathematics to be understood, and will be of great benefit to students in the robotics discipline, including in the areas of mechanics, control, electronics, and computer science. It is also an important source for researchers who wish to investigate the field of robotics or who have an interest in the application of self-organizing phenomena.

This book focuses on the topology theory of mechanisms developed by the authors and provides a systematic method for the topology design of robot mechanisms. The main original theoretical contributions of this book include: A. Three basic concepts * The "geometrical constraint type of axes" is introduced as the third element of the topological structure of a mechanism. When it is combined with the other two elements, the kinematic pair and the connection of links, the symbolic expression of the topological structure is independent of the motion positions (except for the singularity positions) and the fixed coordinate system (Chapter 2). * The position and orientation characteristic (POC) set is used to describe the POC of the relative motion between any two links. The POC set, derived from the unit vector set of the velocity of a link, is only depend on the topological structure of a mechanism. Therefore, it is also independent of the motion positions and the fixed coordinate system (Chapter 3). * The single open chain (SOC) unit is the base unit of the topological structure used to develop the four basic equations of the mechanism topology (Chapters 2, 4-6). B. The mechanism composition principle based on the SOC units This book proposes a mechanism composition principle, based on the SOC units, to establish a systematic theory for the unified modeling of the topology, kinematics, and dynamics of mechanisms based on the SOC units (Chapter 7). C. Four basic equations* The POC equation of serial mechanisms with 10 symbolic operation rules (Chapter 4). * The POC equation of parallel mechanisms with 14 symbolic operation rules (Chapter 5). * The general DOF formula for spatial mechanisms (Chapter 6).* The coupling degree formula for the Assur kinematic chain (Chapter 7). D. One systematic method for the topology design of robot mechanisms (Chapters 8-10) Based on the three basic concepts and the four basic equations addressed above, this book puts forward a systematic method for the topology design of parallel mechanisms, which is fundamentally different from all existing methods. Its main characteristics are as follows:* The design process includes two stages: the first is structure synthesis, which derives many structure types; the second involves the performance analysis, classification and optimization of structure types derived from the first stage. * The design operation is independent of the motion positions and the fixed coordinate system. Therefore, the proposed method is essentially a geometrical method, which ensures the full-cycle DOF and the generality of geometric conditions of mechanism existence. * Each individual design step follows an explicit formula or the guidelines for design criteria, making the operation simple, feasible and reproducible. In addition, the topology design of the SCARA PMs is studied in detail to demonstrate the proposed method (Chapter 10).

This compact and original reference and textbook presents the most important classical and modern essentials of control engineering in a single volume. It constitutes a harmonic mixture of control theory and applications, which makes the book especially useful for students, practicing engineers and researchers interested in modeling and control of processes. Well written and easily understandable, it includes a range of methods for the analysis and design of control systems.

Distributed robotics is a rapidly growing and maturing interdisciplinary research area lying at the intersection of computer science, network science, control theory, and electrical and mechanical engineering. The goal of the Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS) is to exchange and stimulate research ideas to realize advanced distributed robotic systems. This volume of proceedings includes 31 original contributions presented at the 2012 International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS 2012) held in November 2012 at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD USA. The selected papers in this volume are authored by leading researchers from Asia, Europa, and the Americas, thereby providing a broad coverage and perspective of the state-of-the-art technologies, algorithms, system architectures, and applications in distributed robotic systems. The book is organized into five parts, representative of critical long-term and emerging research thrusts in the multi-robot community: Coordination for Perception, Coverage, and Tracking; Task Allocation and Coordination Strategies; Modular Robots and Novel Mechanisms and Sensors; Formation Control and Planning for Robot Teams; and Learning, Adaptation, and Cognition for Robot Teams.

Electroactive polymers (EAPs) respond to electrical stimulation with large deformations. They are dynamic actuators which have attracted attention from an interdisciplinary audience of engineers and scientists. An enabling EAP technology is emerging which attempts to imitate the properties of natural muscle and which, as a result, can perform a unique function in a variety of biologically-inspired robotics applications.

Electroactive Polymers for Robotics Applications covers the fundamental properties, modelling and demonstration of EAPs in robotic applications, focusing particularly on artificial muscles and sensors. Ionic Polymera "Metal Composite Actuators and Dielectric Elastomers are discussed within the book with chapters on their properties and their uses in robotics applications.

With its concentration on devices based on EAPs and their uses, Electroactive Polymers for Robotics Applications will be of interest to researchers working within this field as well as to postgraduate students studying robotics or smart materials and structures. Practitioners working in the mechanical, electrical and materials industries will also find this book of value.

Increasing demands on the output performance, exhaust emissions, and fuel consumption necessitate the development of a new generation of automotive engine functionality. This monograph is written by a long year developmental automotive engineer and offers a wide coverage of automotive engine control and estimation problems and its solutions. It addresses idle speed control, cylinder flow estimation, engine torque and friction estimation, engine misfire and CAM profile switching diagnostics, as well as engine knock detection. The book provides a wide and well structured collection of tools and new techniques useful for automotive engine control and estimation problems such as input estimation, composite adaptation, threshold detection adaptation, real-time algorithms, as well as the very important statistical techniques. It demonstrates the statistical detection of engine problems such as misfire or knock events and how it can be used to build a new generation of robust engine functionality. This book will be useful for practising automotive engineers, black belts working in the automotive industry as well as for lecturers and students since it provides a wide coverage of engine control and estimation problems, detailed and well structured descriptions of useful techniques in automotive applications and future trends and challenges in engine functionality.

Europe has paid a high price for asbestos, with over 100 000 related deaths. First in line in the fight to free buildings from asbestos contamination, workers in the construction sector could soon find a helping hand in the form of an AI-piloted robotic system. The constant and multifaceted evolution of society has left very few industries unchanged. For most sectors, this has meant moving towards increased automation. Most, but not all. One unyielding sector has largely stayed true to its old ways: the construction sector. For the past 200 years, the same repetitive, standardised and physically challenging construction tasks have been performed by workers with their own two hands. But this could change soon, as emerging voices - some of which decided to stand together under the Bots2ReC (Robots to Re-Construction) project - have been calling for the sector to embrace automation. The reasoning behind Bots2ReC is simple: some tasks are simply too hazardous for humans to perform, and machines could easily replace them. Besides the exposure, some processes or the materials handled in those processes generate health hazards in the form of dust, vibration, noise or toxic substances. It is precisely for these tasks that we could expect great benefits from - and also show the massive potential of - automation to achieve sustainable socio-ecological improvements. With its focus on asbestos, the EU H2020 Bots2ReC project is focusing on reducing the future health burden on workers. There is little doubt that the cost of the technology will easily be counterbalanced by its high social benefit and economic efficiency. This books presents the findings and results of the Bots2ReC project, and should be useful for Construction and Robotics Engineers, as well as graduate level students and researchers active in these fields.

DARS is now a well-established conference that gathers every two years the main researchers in Distributed Robotics systems. Even if the field is growing, it has been maintained a one-track conference in order to enforce effective exchanges between the main researchers in the field. It now a well-established tradition to publish the main contributions as a book from Springer. There are already 5 books entitled "Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems" 1 to 5.

In the increasingly competitive modern world, the industrial sector faces new challenges such as improving productivity and reducing costs while taking into account the process operational constraints.As energy demand increases in many countries, especially in big cities where the environmental concerns are very important and resources to produce energy are limited, the efficiency of operation of power plants becomes of paramount importance.Under this scenario, this book presents new methodologies to improve power plants' efficiency, by using automatic control algorithms. This will lead to an improvement in the generation of companies' profit and also in the quality of their final product.

This book describes new theories and applications of artificial neural networks, with a special focus on answering questions in neuroscience, biology and biophysics and cognitive research. It covers a wide range of methods and technologies, including deep neural networks, large scale neural models, brain computer interface, signal processing methods, as well as models of perception, studies on emotion recognition, self-organization and many more. The book includes both selected and invited papers presented at the XXI International Conference on Neuroinformatics, held on October 7-11, 2019, in Dolgoprudny, a town in Moscow region, Russia.

Man is the best thing in the World. Nature does nothing uselessly. Aristotle There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more. John Burroughs The basic purpose of development is to enlarge people's choices. The objective of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives. Mahbub ul Hag Founder of the Human Development Report Theaimofthisbookis toprovidea compiledset ofconcepts,principles,methods and issues used for studying, designing and operating human-minding and natu- minding automation and industrial systems. The depth of presentation is suf?cient for the reader to understand the problems involved and the solution approaches, and appreciate the need of human-automation cooperative interaction, and the - portance of the efforts required for environment and ecosystem protection during any technological and development process in the society. Humans and technology are living and have to live together in a sustainable society and nature. Humans must not be viewed as components of automation and technology in the same way as machines. Automation and technology must incorporate the humans' needs and preferences, and radiate "beauty" in all ways, namely functionally, technically and humanistically. In overall, automation and technology should create comfort and give pleasure.

The present book includes a set of selected papers from the eighth "International Conference on Informatics in Control Automation and Robotics" (ICINCO 2011), held in Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands, from 28 to 31 July 2011. The conference was organized in four simultaneous tracks: "Intelligent Control Systems and Optimization", "Robotics and Automation", "Signal Processing, Sensors, Systems Modeling and Control" and "Industrial Engineering, Production and Management". The book is based on the same structure. ICINCO received 322 paper submissions, not including those of workshops or special sessions, from 52 countries, in all continents. After a double blind paper review performed by the Program Committee only 33 submissions were accepted as full papers and thus selected for oral presentation, leading to a full paper acceptance ratio of 10%. Additional papers were accepted as short papers and posters. A further refinement was made after the conference, based also on the assessment of presentation quality, so that this book includes the extended and revised versions of the very best papers of ICINCO 2011. Commitment to high quality standards is a major concern of ICINCO that will be maintained in the next editions of this conference, including not only the stringent paper acceptance ratios but also the quality of the program committee, keynote lectures, workshops and logistics.

The problem of controlling the output of a system so as to achieve asymptotic tracking of prescribed trajectories and/or asymptotic re jection of undesired disturbances is a central problem in control the ory. A classical setup in which the problem was posed and success fully addressed - in the context of linear, time-invariant and finite dimensional systems - is the one in which the exogenous inputs, namely commands and disturbances, may range over the set of all possible trajectories ofa given autonomous linear system, commonly known as the exogeneous system or, more the exosystem. The case when the exogeneous system is a harmonic oscillator is, of course, classical. Even in this special case, the difference between state and error measurement feedback in the problem ofoutput reg ulation is profound. To know the initial condition of the exosystem is to know the amplitude and phase of the corresponding sinusoid. On the other hand, to solve the output regulation problem in this case with only error measurement feedback is to track, or attenu ate, a sinusoid ofknown frequency but with unknown amplitude and phase. This is in sharp contrast with alternative approaches, such as exact output tracking, where in lieu of the assumption that a signal is within a class of signals generated by an exogenous system, one instead assumes complete knowledge of the past, present and future time history of the trajectory to be tracked."

The book largely represents the extended version of select papers from the Inter- tional Conference on Intelligent Unmanned System ICIUS 2007 which was jointly organized by the Center for Unmanned System Studies at Institut Teknologi Bandung, Artificial Muscle Research Center at Konkuk University and Institute of Bio-inspired Structure and Surface Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astrona- ics. The joint-event was the 3rd conference extending from International Conference on Emerging System Technology (ICEST) in 2005 and International Conference on Technology Fusion (ICTF) in 2006 both conducted in Seoul. ICIUS 2007 was focused on both theory and application primarily covering the topics on robotics, autonomous vehicles and intelligent unmanned technologies. The conference was arranged into three parallel symposia with the following scope of topics: Unmanned Systems: Micro air vehicle, Underwater vehicle, Micro-satellite, - manned aerial vehicle, Multi-agent systems, Autonomous ground vehicle, Blimp, Swarm intelligence, learning and control Robotics and Biomimetics: Artificial muscle actuators, Smart sensors, Design and applications of MEMS/NEMS system, Intelligent robot system, Evolutionary al- rithm, Control of biological systems, AI and expert systems, Biological learning control systems, Neural networks, Genetic algorithm Control and Intelligent System: Distributed intelligence, Distributed/decentralized intelligent control, Distributed or decentralized control methods, Distributed and - bedded systems, Embedded intelligent control, Complex systems, Discrete event s- tems, Hybrid systems, Networked control systems, Delay systems, Fuzzy systems, Identification and estimation, Nonlinear systems, Precision motion control, Control applications, Control engineering education.

This book gives an account of an ellipsoidal calculus and ellipsoidal techniques developed by the authors. The text ranges from a specially developed theory of exact set-valued solutions to the description of ellipsoidal calculus, related ellipsoidal-based methods and examples worked out with computer graphics.