There isn't a facet of human life that has not been touched and influenced by robots and automation. What makes robots and machines versatile is their computational intelligence. While modern intelligent sensors and powerful hardware capabilities have given a huge fillip to the growth of intelligent machines, the progress in the development of algorithms for smart interaction, collaboration and pro-activeness will result in the next quantum jump.

This book deals with the recent advancements in design methodologies, algorithms and implementation techniques to incorporate intelligence in "robots and automation systems." Several articles deal with navigation, localization and mapping of mobile robots, a problem that engineers and researchers are grappling with all the time. Fuzzy logic, neural networks and neuro-fuzzy based techniques for real world applications have been detailed in a few articles.

This edited volume is targeted to present the latest state-of-the-art computational intelligence techniques in Robotics and Automation. It is a compilation of the extended versions of the very best papers selected from the many that were presented at the 5th International Conference on Automation, Robotics and Applications (ICARA 2011) which was held in Wellington, New Zealand from 6-8 December, 2011. Scientists and engineers who work with robots and automation systems will find this book very useful and stimulating.

Traditionally, process design and control system design are performed sequentially. It is only recently displayed that a simultaneous approach to the design and control leads to significant economic benefits and improved dynamic performance during plant operation.

Extensive research in issues such as 'interactions of design and control', 'analysis and design of plant wide control systems', 'integrated methods for design and control' has resulted in impressive advances and significant new technologies that have enriched the variety of instruments available for the design engineer in her endeavour to design and operate new processes. The field of integrated process design and control has reached a maturity level that mingles the best from process knowledge and understanding and control theory on one side, with the best from numerical analysis and optimisation on the other. Direct implementation of integrated methods should soon become the mainstream design procedure.

Within this context 'The Integration of Process Design and Control', bringing together the developments in a variety of topics related to the integrated design and control, will be a real asset for design engineers, practitioners and researchers. Although the individual chapters reach a depth of analysis close to the frontier of current research status, the structure of the book and the autonomous nature of the chapters make the book suitable for a newcomer in the area.

The book comprises four distinct parts:
Part A: Process characterization and controllability analysis
Part B: Integrated process design and control ⊣ Methods
Part C: Plant wide interactions of design and control
Part D: Integrated process design and control ⊣ Extensions

By the end of the book, the reader will have developed a commanding comprehension of the main aspects of integrated design and control, the ability to critically assess the key characteristics and elements related to the interactions between design and control and the capacity to implement the new technology in practice.
* This book brings together the latest developments in a variety of topics related to integrated design and control.
* It is a valuable asset for design engineers, practitioners and researchers.
* The structure of the book and the nature of its chapters also make it suitable for a newcomer to the field.

Exploiting the properties of piezoelectric materials to minimize vibration in rotor-blade actuators, this book demonstrates the potential of smart helicopter rotors to achieve the smoothness of ride associated with jet-engined, fixed-wing aircraft. Vibration control is effected using the concepts of trailing-edge flaps and active-twist. The authors' optimization-based approach shows the advantage of multiple trailing-edge flaps and algorithms for full-authority control of dual trailing-edge-flap actuators are presented. Hysteresis nonlinearity in piezoelectric stack actuators is highlighted and compensated by use of another algorithm. The idea of response surfaces provides for optimal placement of trailing-edge flaps. The concept of active twist involves the employment of piezoelectrically induced shear actuation in rotating beams. Shear is then demonstrated for a thin-walled aerofoil-section rotor blade under feedback-control vibration minimization. Active twist is shown to be significant in reducing vibration caused by dynamic stall. The exposition of ideas, materials and algorithms in this monograph is supported by extensive reporting of results from numerical simulations of smart helicopter rotors. This monograph will be a valuable source of reference for researchers and engineers with backgrounds in aerospace, mechanical and electrical engineering interested in smart materials and vibration control. Advances in Industrial Control aims to report and encourage the transfer of technology in control engineering. The rapid development of control technology has an impact on all areas of the control discipline. The series offers an opportunity for researchers to present an extended exposition of new work in all aspects of industrial control.

Highlighting the control of networked robotic systems, this book synthesizes a unified passivity-based approach to an emerging cross-disciplinary subject. Thanks to this unified approach, readers can access various state-of-the-art research fields by studying only the background foundations associated with passivity. In addition to the theoretical results and techniques, the authors provide experimental case studies on testbeds of robotic systems including networked haptic devices, visual robotic systems, robotic network systems and visual sensor network systems. The text begins with an introduction to passivity and passivity-based control together with the other foundations needed in this book. The main body of the book consists of three parts. The first examines how passivity can be utilized for bilateral teleoperation and demonstrates the inherent robustness of the passivity-based controller against communication delays. The second part emphasizes passivity's usefulness for visual feedback control and estimation. Convergence is rigorously proved even when other passive components are interconnected. The passivity approach is also differentiated from other methodologies. The third part presents the unified passivity-based control-design methodology for multi-agent systems. This scheme is shown to be either immediately applicable or easily extendable to the solution of various motion coordination problems including 3-D attitude/pose synchronization, flocking control and cooperative motion estimation. Academic researchers and practitioners working in systems and control and/or robotics will appreciate the potential of the elegant and novel approach to the control of networked robots presented here. The limited background required and the case-study work described also make the text appropriate for and, it is hoped, inspiring to students.

This volume presents some recent and principal developments related to computational intelligence and optimization methods in control. Theoretical aspects and practical applications of control engineering are covered by 14 self-contained contributions. Additional gems include the discussion of future directions and research perspectives designed to add to the reader's understanding of both the challenges faced in control engineering and the insights into the developing of new techniques. With the knowledge obtained, readers are encouraged to determine the appropriate control method for specific applications.

The proceedings collect the latest research trends, methods and experimental results in the field of electrical and information technologies for rail transportation. The topics cover intelligent computing, information processing, communication technology, automatic control, and their applications in rail transportation etc. The proceedings can be a valuable reference work for researchers and graduate students working in rail transportation, electrical engineering and information technologies.

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.

This book systematizes recent research work on variable-structure control. It is self-contained, presenting necessary mathematical preliminaries so that the theoretical developments can be easily understood by a broad readership. The text begins with an introduction to the fundamental ideas of variable-structure control pertinent to their application in complex nonlinear systems. In the core of the book, the authors lay out an approach, suitable for a large class of systems, that deals with system uncertainties with nonlinear bounds. Its treatment of complex systems in which limited measurement information is available makes the results developed convenient to implement. Various case-study applications are described, from aerospace, through power systems to river pollution control with supporting simulations to aid the transition from mathematical theory to engineering practicalities. The book addresses systems with nonlinearities, time delays and interconnections and considers issues such as stabilization, observer design, and fault detection and isolation. It makes extensive use of numerical and practical examples to render its ideas more readily absorbed. Variable-Structure Control of Complex Systems will be of interest to academic researchers studying control theory and its application in nonlinear, time-delayed an modular large-scale systems; the robustness of its approach will also be attractive to control engineers working in industries associate with aerospace, electrical and mechanical engineering.

This volume contains papers that have been selected after review for oral presentation at ISRM 2015, the Fourth IFToMM International Symposium on Robotics and Mechatronics held in Poitiers, France 23-24 June 2015. These papers provide a vision of the evolution of the disciplines of robotics and mechatronics, including but not limited to: mechanism design; modeling and simulation; kinematics and dynamics of multibody systems; control methods; navigation and motion planning; sensors and actuators; bio-robotics; micro/nano-robotics; complex robotic systems; walking machines, humanoids-parallel kinematic structures: analysis and synthesis; smart devices; new design; application and prototypes. The book can be used by researchers and engineers in the relevant areas of robotics and mechatronics.

This book primarily illustrates the rationale, design and technical realization/verification for the cooperative guidance and control systems (CGCSs) of missile autonomous formation (MAF). From the seven functions to the five major compositions of CGCS, the book systematically explains the theory and modeling, analysis, synthesis and design of CGCSs for MAF, including bionics-based theories. Further, the book addresses how to create corresponding digital simulation analysis systems, as well as hardware in the loop (HIL) simulation test systems and flight test systems, to evaluate the combat effectiveness of MAF. Lastly, it provides detailed information on digital simulation analysis for a large range of wind tunnel test data, as well as test results of HIL system simulations and embedded systems testing.

This book collects some recent developments in stochastic control theory with applications to financial mathematics. We first address standard stochastic control problems from the viewpoint of the recently developed weak dynamic programming principle. A special emphasis is put on the regularity issues and, in particular, on the behavior of the value function near the boundary. We then provide a quick review of the main tools from viscosity solutions which allow to overcome all regularity problems. We next address the class of stochastic target problems which extends in a nontrivial way the standard stochastic control problems. Here the theory of viscosity solutions plays a crucial role in the derivation of the dynamic programming equation as the infinitesimal counterpart of the corresponding geometric dynamic programming equation. The various developments of this theory have been stimulated by applications in finance and by relevant connections with geometric flows. Namely, the second order extension was motivated by illiquidity modeling, and the controlled loss version was introduced following the problem of quantile hedging. The third part specializes to an overview of Backward stochastic differential equations, and their extensions to the quadratic case. "

Session 2 includes 110 papers selected from 2011 3rd International Asia Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (CAR 2011), held on December 24-25, 2011, Shenzhen, China. As we all know, the ever growing technology in robotics and automation will help build a better human society. This session will provide a unique opportunity for the academic and industrial communities to address new challenges, share solutions, and discuss research directions for the future. Robotics research emphasizes intelligence and adaptability to cope with unstructured environments. Automation research emphasizes efficiency, productivity, quality, and reliability, focusing on systems that operate autonomously. The main focus of this session is on the autonomous acquisition of semantic information in intelligent robots and systems, as well as the use of semantic knowledge to guide further acquisition of information.

A smart building is the state-of-art in building with features that facilitates informed decision making based on the available data through smart metering and IoT sensors. This set provides useful information for developing smart buildings including significant improvement of energy efficiency, implementation of operational improvements and targeting sustainable environment to create an effective customer experience. It includes case studies from industrial results which provide cost effective solutions and integrates the digital SCADE solution. Describes complete implication of smart buildings via industrial, commercial and community platforms Systematically defines energy-efficient buildings, employing power consumption optimization techniques with inclusion of renewable energy sources Covers data centre and cyber security with excellent data storage features for smart buildings Includes systematic and detailed strategies for building air conditioning and lighting Details smart building security propulsion. This set is aimed at graduate students, researchers and professionals in building systems, architectural, and electrical engineering.

This volume in the newly established series Advances in Delays and Dynamics (ADD@S) provides a collection of recent results on the design and analysis of Low Complexity Controllers for Time Delay Systems. A widely used indirect method to obtain low order controllers for time delay systems is to design a controller for the reduced order model of the plant. In the dual indirect approach, an infinite dimensional controller is designed first for the original plant model; then, the controller is approximated by keeping track of the degradation in performance and stability robustness measures. The present volume includes new techniques used at different stages of the indirect approach. It also includes new direct design methods for fixed structure and low order controllers. On the other hand, what is meant by low complexity controller is not necessarily low order controller. For example, Smith predictor or similar type of controllers include a copy of the plant internally in the controller, so they are technically infinite dimensional. However, they have very nice numerical properties from the point of reliable implementation. Therefore, such predictor-based controllers are considered as low complexity. This book includes new predictor-based design techniques, with several application examples.

Analysis and Control of Boolean Networks presents a systematic new approach to the investigation of Boolean control networks. The fundamental tool in this approach is a novel matrix product called the semi-tensor product (STP). Using the STP, a logical function can be expressed as a conventional discrete-time linear system. In the light of this linear expression, certain major issues concerning Boolean network topology - fixed points, cycles, transient times and basins of attractors - can be easily revealed by a set of formulae. This framework renders the state-space approach to dynamic control systems applicable to Boolean control networks. The bilinear-systemic representation of a Boolean control network makes it possible to investigate basic control problems including controllability, observability, stabilization, disturbance decoupling etc.

A guide on the use of SVMs in pattern classification, including a rigorous performance comparison of classifiers and regressors. The book presents architectures for multiclass classification and function approximation problems, as well as evaluation criteria for classifiers and regressors. Features: Clarifies the characteristics of two-class SVMs; Discusses kernel methods for improving the generalization ability of neural networks and fuzzy systems; Contains ample illustrations and examples; Includes performance evaluation using publicly available data sets; Examines Mahalanobis kernels, empirical feature space, and the effect of model selection by cross-validation; Covers sparse SVMs, learning using privileged information, semi-supervised learning, multiple classifier systems, and multiple kernel learning; Explores incremental training based batch training and active-set training methods, and decomposition techniques for linear programming SVMs; Discusses variable selection for support vector regressors.

The book introduces possibly the most compact, simple and physically understandable tool that can describe, explain, predict and design the widest set of phenomena in time-variant and nonlinear oscillations. The phenomena described include parametric resonances, combined resonances, instability of forced oscillations, synchronization, distributed parameter oscillation and flatter, parametric oscillation control, robustness of oscillations and many others. Although the realm of nonlinear oscillations is enormous, the book relies on the concept of minimum knowledge for maximum understanding. This unique tool is the method of stationarization, or one frequency approximation of parametric resonance problem analysis in linear time-variant dynamic systems. The book shows how this can explain periodic motion stability in stationary nonlinear dynamic systems, and reveals the link between the harmonic stationarization coefficients and describing functions. As such, the book speaks the language of control: transfer functions, frequency response, Nyquist plot, stability margins, etc. An understanding of the physics of stability loss is the basis for the design of new oscillation control methods for, several of which are presented in the book. These and all the other findings are illustrated by numerical examples, which can be easily reproduced by readers equipped with a basic simulation package like MATLAB with Simulink. The book offers a simple tool for all those travelling through the world of oscillations, helping them discover its hidden beauty. Researchers can use the method to uncover unknown aspects, and as a reference to compare it with other, for example, abstract mathematical means. Further, it provides engineers with a minimalistic but powerful instrument based on physically measurable variables to analyze and design oscillatory systems.

This volume presents a collection of papers presented at the 15th International Symposium of Robotic Research (ISRR). ISRR is the biennial meeting of the International Foundation of Robotic Research (IFRR) and its 15th edition took place in Flagstaff, Arizona on December 9 to December 12, 2011. As for the previous symposia, ISRR 2011 followed up on the successful concept of a mixture of invited contributions and open submissions. Therefore approximately half of the 37 contributions were invited contributions from outstanding researchers selected by the IFRR officers and the program committee, and the other half were chosen among the open submissions after peer review. This selection process resulted in a truly excellent technical program which featured some of the very best of robotic research. The program was organized around oral presentation in a single-track format and included for the first time a small number of interactive presentations. The symposium contributions contained in this volume report on a variety of new robotics research results covering a broad spectrum including perception, manipulation, grasping, vehicles and design, navigation, control and integration, estimation and SLAM.

An autonomous sailboat robot is a boat that only uses the wind on its sail as the propelling force, without remote control or human assistance to achieve its mission. Robotic sailing offers the potential of long range and long term autonomous wind propelled, solar or wave-powered carbon neutral devices. Robotic sailing devices could contribute to monitoring of environmental, ecological, meteorological, hydrographic and oceanographic data. These devices can also be used in traffic monitoring, border surveillance, security, assistance and rescue. The dependency on changing winds and sea conditions presents a considerable challenge for short and long term route and stability planning, collision avoidance and boat control. Building a robust and seaworthy sailing robot presents a truly complex and multi-disciplinary challenge for boat designers, naval architects, systems/electrical engineers and computer scientists. Over the last decade, several events such as Sailbot, World Robotic Sailing Championship and the International Robotic Sailing Conference (WRSC/IRSC) and Microtransat have sparked an explosion in the number of groups working on autonomous sailing robots. Many of the challenges in building truly autonomous sailing robots still remain unsolved. These proceedings present the work of researchers on current and future challenges in autonomous sailboat development, presented at the WRSC/IRSC 2014 in Galway, Ireland, 8th - 12th September 2014.

Mathematical optimization encompasses both a rich and rapidly evolving body of fundamental theory, and a variety of exciting applications in science and engineering. The present book contains a careful selection of articles on recent advances in optimization theory, numerical methods, and their applications in engineering. It features in particular new methods and applications in the fields of optimal control, PDE-constrained optimization, nonlinear optimization, and convex optimization. The authors of this volume took part in the 14th Belgian-French-German Conference on Optimization (BFG09) organized in Leuven, Belgium, on September 14-18, 2009. The volume contains a selection of reviewed articles contributed by the conference speakers as well as three survey articles by plenary speakers and two papers authored by the winners of the best talk and best poster prizes awarded at BFG09. Researchers and graduate students in applied mathematics, computer science, and many branches of engineering will find in this book an interesting and useful collection of recent ideas on the methods and applications of optimization.

Stochastic Averaging and Extremum Seeking treats methods inspired by attempts to understand the seemingly non-mathematical question of bacterial chemotaxis and their application in other environments. The text presents significant generalizations on existing stochastic averaging theory developed from scratch and necessitated by the need to avoid violation of previous theoretical assumptions by algorithms which are otherwise effective in treating these systems. Coverage is given to four main topics. Stochastic averaging theorems are developed for the analysis of continuous-time nonlinear systems with random forcing, removing prior restrictions on nonlinearity growth and on the finiteness of the time interval. The new stochastic averaging theorems are usable not only as approximation tools but also for providing stability guarantees. Stochastic extremum-seeking algorithms are introduced for optimization of systems without available models. Both gradient- and Newton-based algorithms are presented, offering the user the choice between the simplicity of implementation (gradient) and the ability to achieve a known, arbitrary convergence rate (Newton). The design of algorithms for non-cooperative/adversarial games is described. The analysis of their convergence to Nash equilibria is provided. The algorithms are illustrated on models of economic competition and on problems of the deployment of teams of robotic vehicles. Bacterial locomotion, such as chemotaxis in E. coli, is explored with the aim of identifying two simple feedback laws for climbing nutrient gradients. Stochastic extremum seeking is shown to be a biologically-plausible interpretation for chemotaxis. For the same chemotaxis-inspired stochastic feedback laws, the book also provides a detailed analysis of convergence for models of nonholonomic robotic vehicles operating in GPS-denied environments. The book contains block diagrams and several simulation examples, including examples arising from bacterial locomotion, multi-agent robotic systems, and economic market models. Stochastic Averaging and Extremum Seeking will be informative for control engineers from backgrounds in electrical, mechanical, chemical and aerospace engineering and to applied mathematicians. Economics researchers, biologists, biophysicists and roboticists will find the applications examples instructive.

This book contains research contributions from leading global scholars in nature-inspired computing. It includes comprehensive coverage of each respective topic, while also highlighting recent and future trends. The contributions provides readers with a snapshot of the state of the art in the field of nature-inspired computing and its application. This book has focus on the current researches while highlighting the empirical results along with theoretical concepts to provide a comprehensive reference for students, researchers, scholars, professionals and practitioners in the field of Advanced Artificial Intelligence, Nature-Inspired Algorithms and Soft Computing.