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.

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 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.

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 presents recent research in the field of interaction between computational intelligence and mathematics. In the current technological age, we face the challenges of tackling very complex problems - in the usual sense, but also in the mathematical and theoretical computer science sense. However, even the most up-to-date results in mathematics, are unable to provide exact solutions of such problems, and no further technical advances will ever make it possible to find general and exact solutions. Constantly developing technologies (including social technologies) necessitate handling very complex problems. This has led to a search for acceptably "good" or precise solutions, which can be achieved by the combination of traditional mathematical techniques and computational intelligence tools, in order to solve the various problems emerging in many different areas to a satisfactory degree. Important funding programs, such as the European Commission's current framework programme for research and innovation - Horizon 2020 - are devoted to the development of new instruments to deal with the current challenges. Without doubt, research topics associated with the interactions between computational intelligence and traditional mathematics play a key role. Presenting contributions from engineers, scientists and mathematicians, this book offers a series of novel solutions for meaningful and real-world problems that connect those research areas.

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."

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.

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.

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 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.

This book aims at addressing the challenges of contemporary manufacturing in Industry 4.0 environment and future manufacturing (aka Industry 5.0), by implementing soft computing as one of the major sub-fields of artificial intelligence. It contributes to development and application of the soft computing systems, including links to hardware, software and enterprise systems, in resolving modern manufacturing issues in complex, highly dynamic and globalized industrial circumstances. It embraces heterogeneous complementary aspects, such as control, monitoring and modeling of different manufacturing tasks, including intelligent robotic systems and processes, addressed by various machine learning and fuzzy techniques; modeling and parametric optimization of advanced conventional and non-conventional, eco-friendly manufacturing processes by using machine learning and evolutionary computing techniques; cybersecurity framework for Internet of Things-based systems addressing trustworthiness and resilience in machine-to-machine and human-machine collaboration; static and dynamic digital twins integration and synchronization in a smart factory environment; STEP-NC technology for a smart machine vision system, and integration of Open CNC with Service-Oriented Architecture for STEP-NC monitoring system in a smart manufacturing. Areas of interest include but are not limited to applications of soft computing to address the following: dynamic process/system modeling and simulation, dynamic process/system parametric optimization, dynamic planning and scheduling, smart, predictive maintenance, intelligent and autonomous systems, improved machine cognition, effective digital twins integration, human-machine collaboration, robots, and cobots.

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

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.

A complete reference to adaptive control of systems with nonsmooth industrial nonlinearities such as:- backlash- dead-zones- component failure- friction- hysteresis- saturation- time delays. These nonlinearities in industrial actuators cause severe problems in the motion control of industrial processes, particularly in view of modern requirements of speed and precision of movement such as occur in semiconductor manufacturing, precision machining, and elsewhere. Actuator nonlinearities are ubiquitous in engineering practice and limit control system performance. While standard feedback control alone cannot handle these nonsmooth nonlinearities effectively, this book, with unified and systematic adaptive design methods developed in 16 chapters, shows how such nonlinear characteristics can be effectively compensated for by using adaptive and intelligent control techniques. This allows desired system performance to be achieved in the presence of uncertain nonlinearities. With extensive surveys of literature and comprehensive summaries of various design methods, the authors of the book chapters, who are experts in their areas of interest, present new solutions to some important issues in adaptive control of systems with various sorts of nonsmooth nonlinearities.In addition to providing solutions, the book is also aimed at motivating more research activities in the important field of adaptive control of nonsmooth nonlinear industrial systems by formulating several challenging open problems in related areas.

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.

Recently, there has been considerable research interest in neural network control of robots, and satisfactory results have been obtained in solving some of the special issues associated with the problems of robot control in an "on-and-off" fashion. This book is dedicated to issues on adaptive control of robots based on neural networks. The text has been carefully tailored to (i) give a comprehensive study of robot dynamics, (ii) present structured network models for robots, and (iii) provide systematic approaches for neural network based adaptive controller design for rigid robots, flexible joint robots, and robots in constraint motion. Rigorous proof of the stability properties of adaptive neural network controllers is provided. Simulation examples are also presented to verify the effectiveness of the controllers, and practical implementation issues associated with the controllers are also discussed.

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.

This edited volume contains sixteen research articles and presents recent and pressing issues in stochastic processes, control theory, differential games, optimization, and their applications in finance, manufacturing, queueing networks, and climate control. One of the salient features is that the book is highly multi-disciplinary. It assembles experts from the fields of operations research, control theory and optimization, stochastic analysis, and financial engineering to review and substantially update the recent progress in these fields. Another distinct characteristic of the book is that all papers are motivated by applications in which optimization, control, and stochastics are inseparable. The book will be a timely addition to the literature and will be of interest to people working in the aforementioned fields.

Most importantly, this volume is dedicated to Professor Suresh Sethi on the occasion of his 60th birthday. In view of his fundamental contributions, his distinguished career, his substantial achievements, his influence on the areas of control theory and applications, operations research, and management science, and his dedication to the scientific community, a number of leading experts in the fields of optimization, control, and operation management, have contributed to this volume in honor of him.

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."

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.

Microsystems are an important success factor in the automobile industry. In order to fulfil the customers' requests for safety convenience and vehicle economy, and to satisfy environmental requirements, microsystems are becoming indispensable. Thus a large number of microsystem applications came into the discussion. With the international conference AMAA 2000, VDI/VDE-IT provides a platform for the discussion of all MST relevant components for automotive applications. The conference proceedings gather the papers by authors from automobile suppliers and manufacturers.

In the mathematical treatment of many problems which arise in physics, economics, engineering, management, etc., the researcher frequently faces two major difficulties: infinite dimensionality and randomness of the evolution process. Infinite dimensionality occurs when the evolution in time of a process is accompanied by a space-like dependence; for example, spatial distribution of the temperature for a heat-conductor, spatial dependence of the time-varying displacement of a membrane subject to external forces, etc. Randomness is intrinsic to the mathematical formulation of many phenomena, such as fluctuation in the stock market, or noise in communication networks. Control theory of distributed parameter systems and stochastic systems focuses on physical phenomena which are governed by partial differential equations, delay-differential equations, integral differential equations, etc., and stochastic differential equations of various types. This has been a fertile field of research with over 40 years of history, which continues to be very active under the thrust of new emerging applications. Among the subjects covered are: Control of distributed parameter systems; Stochastic control; Applications in finance/insurance/manufacturing; Adapted control; Numerical approximation . It is essential reading for applied mathematicians, control theorists, economic/financial analysts and engineers.

This book is the fourth volume of the sub series of the Lecture Notes in Mobility dedicated to Road Vehicle Automation. lts chapters have been written by researchers, engineers and analysts from all around the globe. Topics covered include public sector activities, human factors and challenges, ethical, legal, energy and technology perspectives, vehicle systems development, as well as transportation infrastructure and planning. The book is based on the Automated Vehicles Symposium which took place in San Francisco, California (USA) in July 2016.

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.