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

Hyperbolic geometry is an essential part of theoretical astrophysics and cosmology. Besides specialists of these domains, many specialists of new domains start to show a growing interest
both to hyperbolic geometry and to cellular automata. This is especially the case in biology and computer science.

This book gives the reader a deep and efficient introduction to an algorithmic approach to hyperbolic geometry. It focuses the attention on the possibilities to obtain in this frame the power of computing everything a computer can compute, that is to say: universality.

The minimal ways to get universality are investigated in a large family of tilings of the hyperbolic plane. In several cases the best results are obtained.In all cases, the results are close to the theoretical best values. This gives rise to fantastic illustrations: the results are jewels in all meanings of the word.

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Maurice MARGENSTERN is professor emeritus at the University of Lorraine, he is a member of LITA, the research unit of computer science in the campus of Metz of this university. Professor Margenstern is amongst top world experts in theory of computation, mathematical machines and geometry. He is a pioneer
in cellular automata in hyperbolic spaces.

This book presents cutting-edge results on stability analysis and control scheme designs for networked teleoperation systems. It highlights new research on commonly encountered nonlinear teleoperation systems, including the stability analysis of teleoperation systems with asymmetric time-varying delays, stability analysis of teleoperation systems with interval time delays, and so on. Moreover, the book presents several high-performance control scheme designs for teleoperation systems when the velocity is available and unavailable, and for systems with nonlinear input. The results presented here mark a substantial contribution to nonlinear teleoperation system theory, robotic control theory and networked control system theory. As such, the book will be of interest to university researchers, R&D engineers and graduate students in control theory and control engineering who wish to learn about the core principles, methods, algorithms, and applications of networked teleoperation systems, robotic systems and nonlinear control systems.

The book offers a comprehensive overview of controllability problems and minimum energy control for broad classes of dynamical systems, including linear, semilinear and nonlinear systems, which are important for modeling systems in automatic control, electrical engineering, mechanics and informatics. It develops the theory of controllability for both finite and infinite dimensional dynamical systems described by differential state equation, and studies in detail functional analysis and matrix algebra, which provide essential and effective tools for the new solutions of a number of important controllability problems. The theoretical results are illustrated by examples throughout the book. Primarily intended for academic researchers working in mathematical control theory, the self-contained text is easily accessible and particularly interesting for control engineering and applied mathematics graduates.

This book presents a systematic study on the inherent complexity in fuzzy systems, resulting from the large number and the poor transparency of the fuzzy rules. The study uses a novel approach for complexity management, aimed at compressing the fuzzy rule base by removing the redundancy while preserving the solution. The compression is based on formal methods for presentation, manipulation, transformation and simplification of fuzzy rule bases.

Noise is a rich concept playing an underlying role in human activity. Consideration of the noise phenomenon in arts and sciences, respectively, makes the distinction between both domains more obvious. Artists create "deliberate noise"; the masterpieces of literature, music, modern fine art etc. are those where a clear idea, traditionally related to such concepts as love, is presented under a skilful veil of "deliberate noise." On the contrary, sciences fight against noise; a scientific discovery is a law of nature extracted from a noisy medium and refined.

This book discusses the methods of fighting against noise. It can be regarded as a mathematical view of specific engineering problems with known and new methods of control and estimation in noisy media.

The main feature of this book is the investigation of stochastic optimal control and estimation problems with the noise processes acting dependently on the state (or signal) and observation systems. While multiple early and recent findings on the subject have been obtained and challenging problems remain to be solved, this subject has not yet been dealt with systematically nor properly investigated. The discussion is given for infinite dimensional systems, but within the linear quadratic framework for continuous and finite time horizon. In order to make this book self-contained, some background material is provided.

Consequently, the target readers of this book are both applied mathematicians and theoretically oriented engineers who are designing new technology, as well as students of the related branches. The book may also be used as a reference manual in that part of functional analysis that is needed for problems of infinite dimensional linear systems theory.

This book gathers concepts of information across diverse fields physics, electrical engineering and computational science surveying current theories, discussing underlying notions of symmetry, and showing how the capacity of a system to distinguish itself relates to information. The author develops a formal methodology using group theory, leading to the application of Burnside's Lemma to count distinguishable states. This provides a tool to quantify complexity and information capacity in any physical system.

This volume collects the edited and reviewed contributions presented in the 5th iTi Conference in Bertinoro covering fundamental aspects in turbulent flows. In the spirit of the iTi initiative, the volume is produced after the conference so that the authors had the possibility to incorporate comments and discussions raised during the meeting.

Turbulence presents a large number of aspects and problems, which are still unsolved and which challenge research communities in engineering and physical sciences both in basic and applied research. The book presents recent advances in theory related to new statistical approaches, effect of non-linearities and presence of symmetries. This edition presents new contributions related to the physics and control of laminar-turbulent transition in wall-bounded flows, which may have a significant impact on drag reduction applications. Turbulent boundary layers, at increasing Reynolds number, are the main subject of both computational and experimental long research programs aimed at improving our knowledge on scaling, energy distribution at different scales, structure eduction, roughness effects to name only a few. Like previous editions several numerical and experimental analysis of complex flows, mostly related to applications, are presented.

The structure of the present book is as such that contributions have been bundled according to covering topics i.e. I Theory, II Stability, III Wall bounded flows, IV, Complex flows, V Acoustic, VI Numerical methods.

The volume is dedicated to the memory of Prof. Rudolf Friedrich who prematurely died in Munster/Germany on the 16th of August 2012. In his honor the conference has started with a special session dedicated to his work.

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This monograph has arisen from the multidisciplinary research extending over biology, robotics and hybrid systems theory. It is inspired by modeling reactive behavior of the immune system cell population, where each cell is considered an independent agent. The authors formulate the optimal control of maximizing the probability of robotic presence in a given region and discuss the application of the Minimum Principle for partial differential equations to this problem.

Selected papers submitted by participants of the international Conference "Stochastic Analysis and Applied Probability 2010" ( www.saap2010.org ) make up the basis of this volume.

The SAAP 2010 was held in Tunisia, from 7-9 October, 2010, and was organized by the "Applied Mathematics & Mathematical Physics" research unit of the preparatory institute to the military academies of Sousse (Tunisia), chaired by Mounir Zili.

The papers cover theoretical, numerical and applied aspects of stochastic processes and stochastic differential equations. The study of such topic is motivated in part by the need to model, understand, forecast and control the behavior of many natural phenomena that evolve in time in a random way. Such phenomena appear in the fields of finance, telecommunications, economics, biology, geology, demography, physics, chemistry, signal processing and modern control theory, to mention just a few.

As this book emphasizes the importance of numerical and theoretical studies of the stochastic differential equations and stochastic processes, it will be useful for a wide spectrum of researchers in applied probability, stochastic numerical and theoretical analysis and statistics, as well as for graduate students.

To make it more complete and accessible for graduate students, practitioners and researchers, the editors Mounir Zili and Daria Filatova have included a survey dedicated to the basic concepts of numerical analysis of the stochastic differential equations, written by Henri Schurz.

Model reduction and coarse-graining are important in many areas of science and engineering. How does a system with many degrees of freedom become one with fewer? How can a reversible micro-description be adapted to the dissipative macroscopic model? These crucial questions, as well as many other related problems, are discussed in this book. All contributions are by experts whose specialities span a wide range of fields within science and engineering.

The book addresses the control issues such as stability analysis, control synthesis and filter design of Markov jump systems with the above three types of TPs, and thus is mainly divided into three parts. Part I studies the Markov jump systems with partially unknown TPs. Different methodologies with different conservatism for the basic stability and stabilization problems are developed and compared. Then the problems of state estimation, the control of systems with time-varying delays, the case involved with both partially unknown TPs and uncertain TPs in a composite way are also tackled. Part II deals with the Markov jump systems with piecewise homogeneous TPs. Methodologies that can effectively handle control problems in the scenario are developed, including the one coping with the asynchronous switching phenomenon between the currently activated system mode and the controller/filter to be designed. Part III focuses on the Markov jump systems with memory TPs. The concept of -mean square stability is proposed such that the stability problem can be solved via a finite number of conditions. The systems involved with nonlinear dynamics (described via the Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy model) are also investigated. Numerical and practical examples are given to verify the effectiveness of the obtained theoretical results. Finally, some perspectives and future works are presented to conclude the book.

Over the last thirty years an abundance of papers have been writ ten on adaptive dynamic control systems. Nevertheless, now it may be predicted with confidence that the adaptive mechanics, a new division, new line of inquiry in one of the violently developing fields of cybernetic mechanics, is emerging. The birth process falls far short of being com pleted. There appear new problems and methods of their solution in the framework of adaptive nonlinear dynamics. Therefore, the present work cannot be treated as a certain polished, brought-to-perfection school textbook. More likely, this is an attempt to show a number of well known scientific results in the parametric synthesis of nonlinear systems (this, strictly speaking, accounts for the availability of many reviews), as well as to bring to notice author's developments on this question undoubtedly modern and topical. The nonlinear, and practically La grangian, systems cover a wide class of classical objects in theoretical mechanics, and primarily solid-body (robotic, gyroscopic, rocket-cosmic, and other) systems. And what is rather important, they have a direct trend to practical application. To indicate this discussion, I should like to notice that it does not touch upon the questions concerned with the linear and stochastic con trolobjects. Investigated are only nonlinear deterministic systems being in the conditions when some system parameters are either unknown or beyond the reach of measurement, or they execute an unknown limited and fairly smooth drift in time."

This book explains why complex systems research is important in understanding the structure, function and dynamics of complex natural and social phenomena. It illuminates how complex collective behavior emerges from the parts of a system, due to the interaction between the system and its environment. Readers will learn the basic concepts and methods of complex system research. The book is not highly technical mathematically, but teaches and uses the basic mathematical notions of dynamical system theory, making the book useful for students of science majors and graduate courses.

Supervision, condition-monitoring, fault detection, fault diagnosis and fault management play an increasing role for technical processes and vehicles in order to improve reliability, availability, maintenance and lifetime. For safety-related processes fault-tolerant systems with redundancy are required in order to reach comprehensive system integrity.

This book is a sequel of the book Fault-Diagnosis Systems published in 2006, where the basic methods were described. After a short introduction into fault-detection and fault-diagnosis methods the book shows how these methods can be applied for a selection of 20 real technical components and processes as examples, such as:

Electrical drives (DC, AC)

Electrical actuators

Fluidic actuators (hydraulic, pneumatic)

Centrifugal and reciprocating pumps

Pipelines (leak detection)

Industrial robots

Machine tools (main and feed drive, drilling, milling, grinding)

Heat exchangers

Also realized fault-tolerant systems for electrical drives, actuators and sensors are presented.

The book describes why and how the various signal-model-based and process-model-based methods were applied and which experimental results could be achieved. In several cases a combination of different methods was most successful.

The book is dedicated to graduate students of electrical, mechanical, chemical engineering and computer science and for engineers.

The theory of linear functional observers, which is the subject of this book, is increasingly becoming a popular researched topic because of the many advantages it presents in state observation and control system design. This book presents recent information on the current state of the art research in this field. This book will serve as a useful reference to researchers in this area of research to understand the fundamental concepts relevant to the theory of functional observers and to gather most recent advancements in the field. This book is useful to academics and postgraduate students researching into the theory of linear functional observers. This book can also be useful for specialized final year undergraduate courses in control systems engineering and applied mathematics with a research focus.

In this book for the first time two scientific fields - consensus formation and synchronization of communications - are presented together and examined through their interrelational aspects, of rapidly growing importance. Both fields have indeed attracted enormous research interest especially in relation to complex networks.
In networks of dynamic systems (or agents), consensus means to reach an agreement regarding a certain quantity of interest that depends on the state of all dynamical systems (agents). Consensus problems have a long history in control theory and computer sciences, and form the foundation of the field of distributed computing. Synchronization, which defines correlated-in-time behavior between different processes and roots going back to Huygens to the least, is now a highly popular, exciting and rapidly developing topic, with applications ranging from biological networks to mathematical epidemiology, and from processing information in the brain to engineering of communications devices.
The book reviews recent finding in both fields and describes novel approaches to consensus formation, where consensus is realized as an instance of the nonlinear dynamics paradigm of chaos synchronization. The chapters are written by world-known experts in both fields and cover topics ranging from fundaments to various applications of consensus and synchronization."

"AutomaticControl of Atmospheric and Space Flight Vehicles" is perhaps the firstbook on the market to present a unified and straightforwardstudyof the design and analysis of automatic control systems for both atmospheric and space flight vehicles.Covering basic control theory and design concepts, it is meantas a textbook for senior undergraduate and graduate students in moderncourses on flight control systems.

In addition to the basics of flight control, this book covers a number ofupper-level topicsand will therefore be of interest not only to advanced students, but also toresearchers and practitioners in aeronautical engineering, applied mathematics, and systems/control theory."

This monograph is devoted to construction of novel theoretical approaches of m- eling non-homogeneous structural members as well as to development of new and economically ef?cient (simultaneously keeping the required high engineering ac- racy)computationalalgorithmsofnonlineardynamics(statics)ofstronglynonlinear behavior of either purely continuous mechanical objects (beams, plates, shells) or hybrid continuous/lumped interacting mechanical systems. In general, the results presented in this monograph cannot be found in the - isting literature even with the published papers of the authors and their coauthors. We take a challenging and originally developed approach based on the integrated mathematical-numerical treatment of various continuous and lumped/continuous mechanical structural members, putting emphasis on mathematical and physical modeling as well as on the carefully prepared and applied novel numerical - gorithms used to solve the derived nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) mainly via Bubnov-Galerkin type approaches. The presented material draws on the ?elds of bifurcation, chaos, control, and s- bility of the objects governed by strongly nonlinear PDEs and ordinary differential equations (ODEs),and may have a positive impact on interdisciplinary ? elds of n- linear mechanics, physics, and applied mathematics. We show, for the ?rst time in a book, the complexity and fascinating nonlinear behavior of continual mechanical objects, which cannot be found in widely reported bifurcational and chaotic dyn- ics of lumped mechanical systems, i. e. , those governed by nonlinear ODEs.

This work addresses the topic of philosophical complexity, which shares certain assumptions with scientific complexity, cybernetics, and General Systems Theory, but which is also developing as a subject field in its own right. Specifically, the post-structural reading of philosophical complexity that was pioneered by Paul Cilliers is further developed in this study. To this end, the ideas of a number of contemporary French post-structural theorists and their predecessors - including Derrida, Nancy, Bataille, Levinas, Foucault, Saussure, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hegel - are introduced. The implications that their various insights hold for our understanding of complex human systems are teased out at the hand of the themes of economy, (social) ontology, subjectivity, epistemology, and ethics. The analyses are also illuminated at the hand of the problematic of the foreigner and the related challenges of showing hospitality to foreigners. The study presents a sophisticated account of both philosophical complexity and philosophies of difference. By relating these subject fields, the study also extends our understanding of philosophical complexity, and offers an original characterisation of the aforementioned philosophers as complex thinkers.

In May 2002 a number of about 20 scientists from various disciplines were invited by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities to participate in an interdisciplinary workshop on structures and structure generating processes. The site was the beautiful little castle of Blankensee, south of Berlin. The disciplines represented ranged from mathematics and information theory, over various ?elds of engineering, biochemistry and biology, to the economic and social sciences. All participants presented talks explaining the nature of structures considered in their ?elds and the associated procedures of analysis. It soon became evident that the study of structures is indeed a common c- cern of virtually all disciplines. The motivation as well as the methods of analysis, however, differ considerably. In engineering, the generation of artifacts, such as infrastructures or technological processes, are of primary interest. Frequently, the analysis aims there at de?ning a simpli?ed mathematical model for the optimization of the structures and the structure generating processes. Mathematical or heuristic methods are applied, the latter preferably of the type of biology based evolutionary algorithms. On the other hand, setting up complex technical structures is not pos- ble by such simpli?ed model calculations but requires a different and less model but rather knowledge-based type of approach, using empirical rules rather than formal equations. In biochemistry, interest is frequently focussed on the structures of molecules, such as proteins or ribonucleic acids. Again, optimal structures can usually be de?ned.

This book is based on the outcome of the "2012 Interdisciplinary Symposium on Complex Systems" held at the island of Kos. The book consists of 12 selected papers of the symposium starting with a comprehensive overview and classification of complexity problems, continuing by chapters about complexity, its observation, modeling and its applications to solving various problems including real-life applications. More exactly, readers will have an encounter with the structural complexity of vortex flows, the use of chaotic dynamics within evolutionary algorithms, complexity in synthetic biology, types of complexity hidden inside evolutionary dynamics and possible controlling methods, complexity of rugged landscapes, and more. All selected papers represent innovative ideas, philosophical overviews and state-of-the-art discussions on aspects of complexity. The book will be useful as instructional material for senior undergraduate and entry-level graduate students in computer science, physics, applied mathematics and engineering-type work in the area of complexity. The book will also be valuable as a resource of knowledge for practitioners who want to apply complexity to solve real-life problems in their own challenging applications. The authors and editors hope that readers will be inspired to do their own experiments and simulations, based on information reported in this book, thereby moving beyond the scope of the book.

Discrete Event Systems: Analysis and Control is the proceedings of WODES2000 (the 5th Workshop on Discrete Event Systems, held in Ghent, Belgium, on August 21-23, 2000). This book provides a survey of the current state of the art in the field of modeling, analysis and control synthesis of discrete event systems, lecture notes for a mini course on sensitivity analysis for performance evaluation of timed discrete event systems, and 48 carefully selected papers covering all areas of discrete event theory and the most important applications domains. Topics include automata theory and supervisory control (12); Petri net based models for discrete event systems, and their control synthesis (11); (max, +) and timed automata models (9); applications papers related to scheduling, failure detection, and implementation of supervisory controllers (7); formal description of PLCs (6); and finally, stochastic models of discrete event systems (3).

Phase transitions in disordered systems and related dynamical phenomena are a topic of intrinsically high interest in theoretical and experimental physics. This book presents a unified view, adopting concepts from each of the disjoint fields of disordered systems and nonlinear dynamics. Special attention is paid to the glass transition, from both experimental and theoretical viewpoints, to modern concepts of pattern formation, and to the application of the concepts of dynamical systems for understanding equilibrium and nonequilibrium properties of fluids and solids. The content is accessible to graduate students, but will also be of benefit to specialists, since the presentation extends as far as the topics of ongoing research work.