In this book, we look at how cluster technology can be leveraged to build better robots. Algorithms and approaches in key areas of robotics and computer vision, such as map building, path planning, target tracking, action selection and learning, are reviewed and cluster implementations for these are presented.

The objective of the book is to give professionals working in the beowulf cluster or robotics and computer vision fields a concrete view of the strong synergy between the areas as well as to spur further fruitful exploitation of this connection. The book is written at a level appropriate for an advanced undergraduate or graduate student. The key concepts in robotics, computer vision and cluster computing are introduced before being used to make the text useful to a wide audience in these fields.

This book comprises the select proceedings of the International Conference on Materials, Design and Manufacturing for Sustainable Environment (ICMDMSE 2020). The primary focus is on emerging materials and cutting-edge manufacturing technologies for sustainable environment. The book covers a wide range of topics such as advanced materials, vibration, tribology, finite element method (FEM), heat transfer, fluid mechanics, energy engineering, additive manufacturing, robotics and automation, automobile engineering, industry 4.0, MEMS and nanotechnology, optimization techniques, condition monitoring, and new paradigms in technology management. Contents of this book will be useful to students, researchers, and practitioners alike.

ISRR, the "International Symposium on Robotics Research", is one of robotics pioneering Symposia, which has established over the past two decades some of the field's most fundamental and lasting contributions. This book presents the results of the seventeenth edition of "Robotics Research" ISRR15, offering a collection of a broad range of topics in robotics. The content of the contributions provides a wide coverage of the current state of robotics research.: the advances and challenges in its theoretical foundation and technology basis, and the developments in its traditional and new emerging areas of applications. The diversity, novelty, and span of the work unfolding in these areas reveal the field's increased maturity and expanded scope and define the state of the art of robotics and its future direction.

Haptics technology is being used more and more in different applications, such as in computer games for increased immersion, in surgical simulators to create a realistic environment for training of surgeons, in surgical robotics due to safety issues and in mobile phones to provide feedback from user action. The existence of these applications highlights a clear need to understand performance metrics for haptic interfaces and their implications on device design, use and application. Performance Metrics for Haptic Interfaces aims at meeting this need by establishing standard practices for the evaluation of haptic interfaces and by identifying significant performance metrics. Towards this end, a combined physical and psychophysical experimental methodology is presented. Firstly, existing physical performance measures and device characterization techniques are investigated and described in an illustrative way. Secondly, a wide range of human psychophysical experiments are reviewed and the appropriate ones are applied to haptic interactions. The psychophysical experiments are unified as a systematic and complete evaluation method for haptic interfaces. Finally, synthesis of both evaluation methods is discussed. The metrics provided in this state-of-the-art volume will guide readers in evaluating the performance of any haptic interface. The generic methodology will enable researchers to experimentally assess the suitability of a haptic interface for a specific purpose, to characterize and compare devices quantitatively and to identify possible improvement strategies in the design of a system.

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a process where an autonomous vehicle builds a map of an unknown environment while concurrently generating an estimate for its location. This book is concerned with computationally efficient solutions to the large scale SLAM problems using exactly sparse Extended Information Filters (EIF).The invaluable book also provides a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the properties of the information matrix in EIF-based algorithms for SLAM. Three exactly sparse information filters for SLAM are described in detail, together with two efficient and exact methods for recovering the state vector and the covariance matrix. Proposed algorithms are extensively evaluated both in simulation and through experiments.

"Immersive Multimodal Interactive Presence "presents advanced interdisciplinary approaches that connect psychophysical and behavioral haptics research with advances in haptic technology and haptic rendering.

It delivers a summary of the results achieved in the IMMERSENCE European project and includes selected chapters by international researchers. Organized into two parts: I. Psychophysical and Behavioral Basis and II. Technology and Rendering, it is an excellent example of interdisciplinary research directed towards the advancement of multimodal immersive virtual environments with particular focus on haptic interaction.

The twelve chapters of the book are grouped around three different scenarios representing different types of interactions in virtual environments: Person-Object (PO), Person-Object-Person (POP) and Person-Person (PP) interaction. Recent results of psychophysical and behavioral studies are reported along with new technological developments for haptic displays and novel haptic rendering techniques.

There's never been a better time to be an amateur space explorer! From high school programs designed to send real student-led experiments to the International Space Station, to building a working VTVL (vertical take off, vertical landing) model rocket like the one from SpaceX, this issue is packed full of projects with actual space applications. And if a space aesthetic is more to your liking for your earthly abode, we've got a giant light-up full moon to hang on your wall and desktop orreries to simulate the movement of the planets around the sun. Plus 38 more great projects: Program a bot that points to the ISS when overheadLearn to laser-cut EVA foam to customize any cosplay creationBuild a light-up acrylic rainbow that changes colors to tell the weatherMake a cardboard camera that uses sun prints for filmAnd much more!

AI for Digital Warfare explores how the weaponising of artificial intelligence can and will change how warfare is being conducted, and what impact it will have on the corporate world. With artificial intelligence tools becoming increasingly advanced, and in many cases more humanlike, their potential in psychological warfare is being recognised, which means digital warfare can move beyond just shutting down IT systems into more all-encompassing hybrid war strategies.

This introduction to the field of hyper-heuristics presents the required foundations and tools and illustrates some of their applications. The authors organized the 13 chapters into three parts. The first, hyper-heuristic fundamentals and theory, provides an overview of selection constructive, selection perturbative, generation constructive and generation perturbative hyper-heuristics, and then a formal definition of hyper-heuristics. The chapters in the second part of the book examine applications of hyper-heuristics in vehicle routing, nurse rostering, packing and examination timetabling. The third part of the book presents advanced topics and then a summary of the field and future research directions. Finally the appendices offer details of the HyFlex framework and the EvoHyp toolkit, and then the definition, problem model and constraints for the most tested combinatorial optimization problems. The book will be of value to graduate students, researchers, and practitioners.

This book examines the Arabic conflict resolution method known as "sulha." In this process, notable male elders mediate conflicts between and within Arab communities. A lengthy process of political jockeying culminates in a ceremony that peaks when "enemies" shake hands and publicly forgive the crimes of the other. The reality of actual sulha deviates considerably from the ideal, but both the official framework and the actual events point to a deep seated valorization of peace and reconciliation in Israeli-Palestinian society.

This book deals with the problems related to planning motion laws and t- jectories for the actuation system of automatic machines, in particular for those based on electric drives, and robots. The problem of planning suitable trajectories is relevant not only for the proper use of these machines, in order to avoid undesired e?ects such as vibrations or even damages on the mech- ical structure, but also in some phases of their design and in the choice and sizing of the actuators. This is particularly true now that the concept of "el- tronic cams" has replaced, in the design of automatic machines, the classical approach based on "mechanical cams." The choice of a particular trajectory has direct and relevant implications on several aspects of the design and use of an automatic machine, like the dimensioning of the actuators and of the reduction gears, the vibrations and e?orts generated on the machine and on the load, the tracking errors during the motion execution. For these reasons, in order to understand and appreciate the peculiarities of the di?erent techniques available for trajectory planning, besides the ma- ematical aspects of their implementation also a detailed analysis in the time and frequency domains, a comparison of their main properties under di?erent points of view, and general considerations related to their practical use are reported.

This book comprises select proceedings of the International Conference on Future Learning Aspects of Mechanical Engineering (FLAME 2018). The book discusses different topics of industrial and production engineering such as sustainable manufacturing systems, computer-aided engineering, rapid prototyping, manufacturing management and automation, metrology, manufacturing process optimization, casting, welding, machining, and machine tools. The contents of this book will be useful for researchers as well as professionals.

In the not so distant future, we can expect a world where humans and robots coexist and interact with each other. For this to occur, we need to understand human traits, such as seeing, hearing, thinking, speaking, etc., and institute these traits in robots. The most essential feature necessary for robots to achieve is that of integrative multimedia understanding (IMU) which occurs naturally in humans. It allows us to assimilate pieces of information expressed through different modes such as speech, pictures, gestures, etc. The book describes how robots acquire traits like natural language understanding (NLU) as the central part of IMU. Mental image directed semantic theory (MIDST) is its core, and is based on the hypothesis that NLU is essentially the processing of mental image associated with natural language expressions, namely, mental-image based understanding (MBU). MIDST is intended to model omnisensory mental image in human and to afford a knowledge representation system in order for integrative management of knowledge subjective to cognitive mechanisms of intelligent entities such as humans and robots based on a mental image model visualized as 'Loci in Attribute Spaces' and its description language Lmd (mental image description language) to be employed for predicate logic with a systematic scheme for symbol-grounding. This language works as an interlingua among various kinds of information media, and has been applied to several versions of the intelligent system interlingual understanding model aiming at general system (IMAGES). Its latest version, i.e. conversation management system (CMS) simulates MBU and comprehends the user's intention through dialogue to find and solve problems, and finally, provides a response in text or animation. The book is aimed at researchers and students interested in artificial intelligence, robotics, and cognitive science. Based on philosophical considerations, the methodology will also have an appeal in linguistics, psychology, ontology, geography, and cartography. Key Features: Describes the methodology to provide robots with human-like capability of natural language understanding (NLU) as the central part of IMU Uses methodology that also relates to linguistics, psychology, ontology, geography, and cartography Examines current trends in machine translation

This book addresses optimization in robotics, in terms of both the configuration space and the metal structure of the robot arm itself; and discusses, describes and builds different types of heuristics and algorithms in MATLAB. In addition, the book includes a wealth of examples and exercises. In particular, it enables the reader to write a MATLAB code for all the related problems in robotics. The book also offers detailed descriptions of and builds from scratch several types of optimization algorithms using MATLAB and simplified methods, especially for inverse problems and avoiding singularities. Each chapter features examples and exercises to enhance the reader's comprehension. Accordingly, the book offers the reader a better understanding of robot analysis from an optimization standpoint.

This book provides theoretical and practical knowledge on AI and swarm intelligence. It provides a methodology for EA (evolutionary algorithm)-based approach for complex adaptive systems with the integration of several meta-heuristics, e.g., ACO (Ant Colony Optimization), ABC (Artificial Bee Colony), and PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization), etc. These developments contribute towards better problem-solving methodologies in AI. The book also covers emerging uses of swarm intelligence in applications such as complex adaptive systems, reaction-diffusion computing, and diffusion-limited aggregation, etc. Another emphasis is its real-world applications. We give empirical examples from real-world problems and show that the proposed approaches are successful when addressing tasks from such areas as swarm robotics, silicon traffics, image understanding, Vornoi diagrams, queuing theory, and slime intelligence, etc. Each chapter begins with the background of the problem followed by the current state-of-the-art techniques of the field, and ends with a detailed discussion. In addition, the simulators, based on optimizers such as PSO and ABC complex adaptive system simulation, are described in detail. These simulators, as well as some source codes, are available online on the author's website for the benefit of readers interested in getting some hands-on experience of the subject. The concepts presented in this book aim to promote and facilitate the effective research in swarm intelligence approaches in both theory and practice. This book would also be of value to other readers because it covers interdisciplinary research topics that encompass problem-solving tasks in AI, complex adaptive systems, and meta-heuristics.

The book offers an insight on artificial neural networks for giving a robot a high level of autonomous tasks, such as navigation, cost mapping, object recognition, intelligent control of ground and aerial robots, and clustering, with real-time implementations. The reader will learn various methodologies that can be used to solve each stage on autonomous navigation for robots, from object recognition, clustering of obstacles, cost mapping of environments, path planning, and vision to low level control. These methodologies include real-life scenarios to implement a wide range of artificial neural network architectures. Includes real-time examples for various robotic platforms. Discusses real-time implementation for land and aerial robots. Presents solutions for problems encountered in autonomous navigation. Explores the mathematical preliminaries needed to understand the proposed methodologies. Integrates computing, communications, control, sensing, planning, and other techniques by means of artificial neural networks for robotics.

a short and accessible introduction on AI and Cars written by leading experts

This book introduces an unified function approximation approach to the control of uncertain robot manipulators containing general uncertainties. It works for free space tracking control as well as compliant motion control. It is applicable to the rigid robot and the flexible joint robot. Even with actuator dynamics, the unified approach is still feasible. All these features make the book stand out from other existing publications.

Telexistence is a fundamental concept which refers to the general technology that enables a human being to have a real-time sensation of being at a place other than where he or she actually exists, while being able to interact with the remote environment, which may be real, virtual, or a combination of both. It also refers to an advanced type of teleoperation system that enables an operator at the control to perform remote tasks dexterously with the feeling of existing in a surrogate robot working in a remote environment. Telexistence in the real remote environment through a virtual environment is also possible.This book is the first book on telexistence written by the inventor of the concept of this emerging technology. It introduces the concept of telexistence, explains how this concept can be realized, illustrates precisely real examples of the realization of the concept, and determines its future advancement.

Autonomous weapons systems, often referred to as 'killer robots', have been a hallmark of popular imagination for decades. However, with the inexorable advance of artificial intelligence systems (AI) and robotics, killer robots are quickly becoming a reality. These lethal technologies can learn, adapt, and potentially make life and death decisions on the battlefield with little-to-no human involvement. This naturally leads to not only legal but ethical concerns as to whether we can meaningful control such machines, and if so, then how. Such concerns are made even more poignant by the ever-present fear that something may go wrong, and the machine may carry out some action(s) violating the ethics or laws of war. Researchers, policymakers, and designers are caught in the quagmire of how to approach these highly controversial systems and to figure out what exactly it means to have meaningful human control over them, if at all. In Designed for Death, Dr Steven Umbrello aims to not only produce a realistic but also an optimistic guide for how, with human values in mind, we can begin to design killer robots. Drawing on the value sensitive design (VSD) approach to technology innovation, Umbrello argues that context is king and that a middle path for designing killer robots is possible if we consider both ethics and design as fundamentally linked. Umbrello moves beyond the binary debates of whether or not to prohibit killer robots and instead offers a more nuanced perspective of which types of killer robots may be both legally and ethically acceptable, when they would be acceptable, and how to design for them.

In this book, we have set up a unified analytical framework for various human-robot systems, which involve peer-peer interactions (either space-sharing or time-sharing) or hierarchical interactions. A methodology in designing the robot behavior through control, planning, decision and learning is proposed. In particular, the following topics are discussed in-depth: safety during human-robot interactions, efficiency in real-time robot motion planning, imitation of human behaviors from demonstration, dexterity of robots to adapt to different environments and tasks, cooperation among robots and humans with conflict resolution. These methods are applied in various scenarios, such as human-robot collaborative assembly, robot skill learning from human demonstration, interaction between autonomous and human-driven vehicles, etc. Key Features: Proposes a unified framework to model and analyze human-robot interactions under different modes of interactions. Systematically discusses the control, decision and learning algorithms to enable robots to interact safely with humans in a variety of applications. Presents numerous experimental studies with both industrial collaborative robot arms and autonomous vehicles.

This book reports on cutting-edge legal, ethical, social and economic issues relating to robotics and automation, human-machine interaction and artificial intelligence, in different application areas. It discusses important problems such as robotic taxation, social inequality, protection of neuro-human and children rights, among others. It describes current advances and challenges in robotic regulation and governance, as well as findings relating to sustainability of robotic industries, thus filling an important gap in the robotic and AI literature. Chapters consists of revised and extended contributions to the workshop session "Debate on legal, ethical & socio-economic aspects of interactive robotics" of INBOTS 2021, held virtually on May 18-20, 2021.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the area of robot mechanisms, primarily considering industrial manipulators and humanoid arms. The book is intended for both teaching and self-study. Emphasis is given to the fundamentals of kinematic analysis and the design of robot mechanisms. The coverage of topics is untypical. The focus is on robot kinematics. The book creates a balance between theoretical and practical aspects in the development and application of robot mechanisms, and includes the latest achievements and trends in robot science and technology.

You have been tasked with increasing productivity and increasing quality, while at the same time lowering the cost of your manufacturing processes. The solution is to automate ... but how? Identifying a manufacturing process that can be automated is often a daunting task. It requires a team approach to qualifying, validating, and then finally, implementing a program. This book takes you through the best practices for each step, regardless of the application type or the industry segment. It will show you how to achieve the system expectations that were planned for and benchmarked, and it will also help identify the most common pitfalls - all without having to eliminate employees. Provides a broad, semi-detailed review of various robotic applications based on process, including machine tending for CNC machine, press brake tending, deburring, grinding, dispensing, and welding. Incorporates existing articles, as well as the author's own knowledge to describe points of interest and background. Illustrates points by featuring using an interview format between the author and the user or expert providing opinion and insight. Features numerous illustrations, drawings, and charts in every chapter. Uses case studies to describe points and features North American based examples. Chapter 1 - Why Automate the Small and Medium Sized Manufacturers (SMMs)? Productivity can Save the Factory Industrial Robots Reduce Labor Costs and Increase Productivity Partnering with your customer and supplier to reduce costs Justifying Robotic Automation The ROI Power of Industrial Robotics Additional Benefits of Implementing Industrial RoboticsApplying Present Value Tools to Evaluate the Robot Investment Resources Manufacturers Need to Become Familiar With Chapter 2 - Implementing Robotic Automation - Getting Started Robotic Implementation is Always a Team Effort Ingredients of the Robotic System Judging a Good Project from a Bad Project Gather the Right Details Criteria for Arc Welding Criteria for Tending Machines Criteria for Press Tending Criteria for Palletizing/De-Palletizing Data Criteria for Material Removal Constants and Variables of a Robot System Chapter 3 - Robotics and Risk Risk and Cost Hidden Risk Risk of Your Own Managers and Personnel Managing What You Control Risk of Technology Chapter 4 - Setting Expectations for Success Tools for Validating the Robotic Process Proof of Concept Case Studies Chapter 5 - Writing the Right Specifications Defining Elements of the Scope of Work Scope of Work Example - Robotic Finishing Cylinder Head Line Case Study Scope of Work Example -Robotic Press Tending Case Study Chapter 6 - Lean Manufacturing With Robotics for Low Volume, Small Batch Runs Man vs. MachineChangeover for Small Batches Suggestions for the Design of a Robotic Work-Cell Automating the machining process - Case Study Automating the welding process for small batch runs Automating the material removal process for small batch runs Automating small batch runs for press tending and palletizing Automating the palletizing process for small batch runs Tools for small batch and high changeover production Chapter 7 - Lean Manufacturing with Robotics for High Volume, Large Batch Runs Robotic Machine Tending for High Production Running Lights Out Job Shop vs. OEM Robotic Cellular Manufacturing

The last decade has seen the emergence of a unified approach for product design which attempts to combine traditionally distinct tasks such as design, management, marketing, analysis, manufacture and materials. Often called "Concurrent Engineering" or "Simultaneous Engineering", this new philosophy aims at improving cost competitiveness by reducing waste of time, money, and other resources inherent in the iterative traditional methods. In view of the importance of this new philosophy, concurrent engineering was selected as the theme for the conference on which this text is based. The main objective of the conference was to bring together researchers and practitioners from government, industries and academia interested in the multi-disciplinary and inter-organizational productivity aspects of advanced manufacturing systems utilizing CAD/CAM, CAE, CIM, parametric technology, AI, robotics, and AGV technology. A selection of the papers presented at the conference are presented in this, and a companion volume, and emphasize aspects of concurrent engineering and flexible automation. This book of proceedings on robotics, automation and production engineering is intended for researchers and practitioners from government, industries and academia interested in advanced manufacturing systems.