Robotic marine vessels can be used for a wide range of purposes, including defence, marine science, offshore energy and hydrographic surveys, and environmental surveys and protection. Such vessels need to meet a variety of criteria: they must be able to operate in salt water, and to communicate and be controlled over large distances, even when submerged or in inclement weather. Further challenges include 3D navigation of individual vehicles, groups or squadrons. This book covers the current state of research in navigation, modelling and control of marine autonomous vehicles, and deals with various related topics, including collision avoidance, communication, and a range of applications. It provides valuable insights for an audience of researchers, academics and postgraduate students interested in autonomous marine vessels, robotics, and electrical and automobile engineering.

This book features selected papers presented at the 14th International Conference on Electromechanics and Robotics 'Zavalishin's Readings' - ER(ZR) 2019, held in Kursk, Russia, on April 17-20, 2019. The contributions, written by professionals, researchers and students, cover topics in the field of automatic control systems, electromechanics, electric power engineering and electrical engineering, mechatronics, robotics, automation and vibration technologies. The Zavalishin's Readings conference was established as a tribute to the memory of Dmitry Aleksandrovich Zavalishin (1900-1968) - a Russian scientist, corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and founder of the school of valve energy converters based on electric machines and valve converters energy. The first conference was organized by the Institute of Innovative Technologies in Electromechanics and Robotics at the Saint Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation in 2006. The 2019 conference was held with the XIII International Scientific and Technical Conference "Vibration 2019", and was organized by Saint Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation (SUAI), Saint Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPIIRAS) and the Southwest State University (SWSU) in with cooperation Russian Foundation for Basic Research (project No. 19-08-20021).

The book offers an integrated vision on Cloud and HPC, Big Data, Analytics and virtualization in computing-oriented manufacturing, combining information and communication technologies, service-oriented control of holonic architectures as well as enterprise integration solutions based on SOA principles. It is structured in eight parts, each one grouping research and trends in digital manufacturing and service oriented manufacturing control: Cloud and Cyber-Physical Systems for Smart Manufacturing, Reconfigurable and Self-organized Multi-Agent Systems for Industry and Service, Sustainability Issues in Intelligent Manufacturing Systems, Holonic and Multi-agent System Design for Industry and Service, Should Intelligent Manufacturing Systems be Dependable and Safe?, Service-oriented Management and Control of Manufacturing Systems, Engineering and Human Integration in Flexible and Reconfigurable Industrial Systems,Virtualization and Simulation in Computing-oriented Industry and Service.p>

The book reports on advanced topics in interactive robotics research and practice; in particular, it addresses non-technical obstacles to the broadest uptake of these technologies. It focuses on new technologies that can physically and cognitively interact with humans, including neural interfaces, soft wearable robots, and sensor and actuator technologies; further, it discusses important regulatory challenges, including but not limited to business models, standardization, education and ethical-legal-socioeconomic issues. Gathering the outcomes of the 1st INBOTS Conference (INBOTS2018), held on October 16-20, 2018 in Pisa, Italy, the book addresses the needs of a broad audience of academics and professionals working in government and industry, as well as end users. In addition to providing readers with detailed information and a source of inspiration for new projects and collaborations, it discusses representative case studies highlighting practical challenges in the implementation of interactive robots in a number of fields, as well as solutions to improve communication between different stakeholders. By merging engineering, medical, ethical and political perspectives, the book offers a multidisciplinary, timely snapshot of interactive robotics.

This book presents the outcomes of the 16th International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence Research, Management and Applications (SERA 2018), which was held in Kunming, China on June 13-15, 2018. The aim of the conference was to bring together researchers and scientists, businessmen and entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, computer users, and students to discuss the various fields of computer science, to share their experiences, and to exchange new ideas and information in a meaningful way. The book includes findings on all aspects (theory, applications and tools) of computer and information science, and discusses related practical challenges and the solutions adopted to solve them. The conference organizers selected the best papers from those accepted for presentation. The papers were chosen based on review scores submitted by members of the program committee and underwent a further rigorous round of review. From this second round, 13 of the conference's most promising papers were then published in this Springer (SCI) book and not the conference proceedings. We eagerly await the important contributions that we know these authors will make to the field of computer and information science.

This book presents state-of-the-art computational attention models that have been successfully tested in diverse application areas and can build the foundation for artificial systems to efficiently explore, analyze, and understand natural scenes. It gives a comprehensive overview of the most recent computational attention models for processing visual and acoustic input. It covers the biological background of visual and auditory attention, as well as bottom-up and top-down attentional mechanisms and discusses various applications. In the first part new approaches for bottom-up visual and acoustic saliency models are presented and applied to the task of audio-visual scene exploration of a robot. In the second part the influence of top-down cues for attention modeling is investigated.

This book gathers the peer-reviewed proceedings of the 12th Annual Meeting of the Bulgarian Section of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, BGSIAM'17, held in Sofia, Bulgaria, in December 2017. The general theme of BGSIAM'17 was industrial and applied mathematics, with a particular focus on: high-performance computing, numerical methods and algorithms, analysis of partial differential equations and their applications, mathematical biology, control and uncertain systems, stochastic models, molecular dynamics, neural networks, genetic algorithms, metaheuristics for optimization problems, generalized nets, and Big Data.

This book is devoted to one of the most famous examples of automation handling tasks - the "bin-picking" problem. To pick up objects, scrambled in a box is an easy task for humans, but its automation is very complex. In this book three different approaches to solve the bin-picking problem are described, showing how modern sensors can be used for efficient bin-picking as well as how classic sensor concepts can be applied for novel bin-picking techniques. 3D point clouds are firstly used as basis, employing the known Random Sample Matching algorithm paired with a very efficient depth map based collision avoidance mechanism resulting in a very robust bin-picking approach. Reducing the complexity of the sensor data, all computations are then done on depth maps. This allows the use of 2D image analysis techniques to fulfill the tasks and results in real time data analysis. Combined with force/torque and acceleration sensors, a near time optimal bin-picking system emerges. Lastly, surface normal maps are employed as a basis for pose estimation. In contrast to known approaches, the normal maps are not used for 3D data computation but directly for the object localization problem, enabling the application of a new class of sensors for bin-picking.

Wheeled Mobile Robotics: From Fundamentals Towards Autonomous Systemscovers the main topics from the wide area of mobile robotics, explaining all applied theory and application. The book gives the reader a good foundation, enabling them to continue to more advanced topics. Several examples are included for better understanding, many of them accompanied by short MATLAB (R) script code making it easy to reuse in practical work. The book includes several examples of discussed methods and projects for wheeled mobile robots and some advanced methods for their control and localization. It is an ideal resource for those seeking an understanding of robotics, mechanics, and control, and for engineers and researchers in industrial and other specialized research institutions in the field of wheeled mobile robotics. Beginners with basic math knowledge will benefit from the examples, and engineers with an understanding of basic system theory and control will find it easy to follow the more demanding fundamental parts and advanced methods explained.

The primary aim of this volume is to provide researchers and engineers from both academia and industry with up-to-date coverage of recent advances in the fields of robotic welding, intelligent systems and automation. It gathers selected papers from the 2018 International Conference on Robotic Welding, Intelligence and Automation (RWIA 2018), held Oct 20-22, 2018 in Guangzhou, China. The contributions reveal how intelligentized welding manufacturing (IWM) is becoming an inescapable trend, just as intelligentized robotic welding is becoming a key technology. The volume is divided into four main parts: Intelligent Techniques for Robotic Welding, Sensing in Arc Welding Processing, Modeling and Intelligent Control of Welding Processing, and Intelligent Control and its Applications in Engineering.

In almost all depictions of the future, one technology plays a prominent role - the robot. Science fiction movies and stories tell us that, in the not so distant future, robots - from Robbie the Robot to C3PO to the Terminator - will be everywhere, taking care of every human need. Those are projections of the future. But robots have a history as well, and The Robot: A Life Story of a Technology tells their story. During the Englightenment, "automata" were mechnical toys that could simulate human actions. Robots became essential parts of factories, performing tasks perfectly that would be either too dangerous or boring for humans. And recent advances in artificial intelligence have made robots that can behave with intelligence. The Robot covers all aspects of the history of robotics: BLThe mechanical toys in the Enlightenment, from mechanical timepieces and early computational devices, to music boxes and automated human-like figures designed to amuse royalty. BLThe use of automation in the Industrial Revolution, such as the Jacquard punch card loom and the famous "difference engine" of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, and the use of robotic arms in automation. How by the mid-20th century robots became the icon for the future, and became an important feature of the popular culture. BLCurrent trends in robotics, such as research into artificial intelligence and the creation of "friendly robots" that could make an impact in the marketplace. The volume includes a timeline of important events, a glossary of terms, and a bibliography of important primary and secondary sources that are useful for further research.

Focussing on the key technologies in developing robots for a wide range of medical rehabilitation activities - which will include robotics basics, modelling and control, biomechanics modelling, rehabilitation strategies, robot assistance, clinical setup/implementation as well as neural and muscular interfaces for rehabilitation robot control - this book is split into two parts; a review of the current state of the art, and recent advances in robotics for medical rehabilitation. Both parts will include five sections for the five key areas in rehabilitation robotics: (i) the upper limb; (ii) lower limb for gait rehabilitation (iii) hand, finger and wrist; (iv) ankle for strains and sprains; and (v) the use of EEG and EMG to create interfaces between the neurological and muscular functions of the patients and the rehabilitation robots. Each chapter provides a description of the design of the device, the control system used, and the implementation and testing to show how it fulfils the needs of that specific area of rehabilitation. The book will detail new devices, some of which have never been published before in any journal or conference.

This book focuses on the design of Robotic Flexible Assembly Cell (RFAC) with multi-robots. Its main contribution consists of a new effective strategy for scheduling RFAC in a multi-product assembly environment, in which dynamic status and multi-objective optimization problems occur. The developed strategy, which is based on a combination of advanced solution approaches such as simulation, fuzzy logic, system modeling and the Taguchi optimization method, fills an important knowledge gap in the current literature and paves the way for future research towards the goal of employing flexible assembly systems as effectively as possible despite the complexity of their scheduling.

This book provides a general and comprehensible overview of imbalanced learning. It contains a formal description of a problem, and focuses on its main features, and the most relevant proposed solutions. Additionally, it considers the different scenarios in Data Science for which the imbalanced classification can create a real challenge. This book stresses the gap with standard classification tasks by reviewing the case studies and ad-hoc performance metrics that are applied in this area. It also covers the different approaches that have been traditionally applied to address the binary skewed class distribution. Specifically, it reviews cost-sensitive learning, data-level preprocessing methods and algorithm-level solutions, taking also into account those ensemble-learning solutions that embed any of the former alternatives. Furthermore, it focuses on the extension of the problem for multi-class problems, where the former classical methods are no longer to be applied in a straightforward way. This book also focuses on the data intrinsic characteristics that are the main causes which, added to the uneven class distribution, truly hinders the performance of classification algorithms in this scenario. Then, some notes on data reduction are provided in order to understand the advantages related to the use of this type of approaches. Finally this book introduces some novel areas of study that are gathering a deeper attention on the imbalanced data issue. Specifically, it considers the classification of data streams, non-classical classification problems, and the scalability related to Big Data. Examples of software libraries and modules to address imbalanced classification are provided. This book is highly suitable for technical professionals, senior undergraduate and graduate students in the areas of data science, computer science and engineering. It will also be useful for scientists and researchers to gain insight on the current developments in this area of study, as well as future research directions.

This book focuses on small flying drones and their applications in conducting geographic surveys. Scholars and professionals will discover the potential of this tool, and hopefully develop a conceptual and methodological framework for doing the following things: a) Translate their data acquisition needs into specifications. (b) Use the developed specifications to choose the best accessible configuration for their drones, and (c) Design and organize effective and low-cost field deployment and flight operations by integrating technical aspects with regulatory and research requirements. Readers can apply this knowledge to work in cartography, environmental monitoring and analysis, land-use studies and landscape archaeology. Particular attention is also given to the reasons why a drone can dramatically boost a geographer's capability to understand geographic phenomena both from hard-science and humanities-oriented approach.

Mechanical laws of motion were applied very early for better understanding anthropomorphic action as suggested in advance by Newton "For from hence are easily deduced the forces of machines, which are compounded of wheels, pullies, levers, cords, and weights, ascending directly or obliquely, and other mechanical powers; as also the force of the tendons to move the bones of animals". In the 19th century E.J. Marey and E. Muybridge introduced chronophotography to scientifically investigate animal and human movements. They opened the field of motion analysis by being the first scientists to correlate ground reaction forces with kinetics. Despite of the apparent simplicity of a given skilled movement, the organization of the underlying neuro-musculo-skeletal system remains unknown. A reason is the redundancy of the motor system: a given action can be realized by different muscle and joint activity patterns, and the same underlying activity may give rise to several movements. After the pioneering work of N. Bernstein in the 60's on the existence of motor synergies, numerous researchers "walking on the border" of their disciplines tend to discover laws and principles underlying the human motions and how the brain reduces the redundancy of the system. These synergies represent the fundamental building blocks composing complex movements. In robotics, researchers face the same redundancy and complexity challenges as the researchers in life sciences. This book gathers works of roboticists and researchers in biomechanics in order to promote an interdisciplinary research on anthropomorphic systems at large and on humanoid robotics in particular.

This book describes a unified framework for networked teleoperation systems involving multiple research fields: networked control systems for linear and nonlinear forms, bilateral teleoperation, trilateral teleoperation, multilateral teleoperation and cooperative teleoperation. It closely examines networked control as a field at the intersection of systems & control and robotics and presents a number of experimental case studies on testbeds for robotic systems, including networked haptic devices, robotic network systems and sensor network systems. The concepts and results outlined are easy to understand, even for readers fairly new to the subject. As such, the book offers a valuable reference work for researchers and engineers in the fields of systems & control and robotics.

This volume comprises the latest developments in both fundamental science and patient-specific applications, discussing topics such as: cellular mechanics; injury biomechanics; biomechanics of heart and vascular system; medical image analysis; and both patient-specific fluid dynamics and solid mechanics simulations. With contributions from researchers world-wide, the Computational Biomechanics for Medicine series of titles provides an opportunity for specialists in computational biomechanics to present their latest methodologies and advancements.

Space robotics and autonomous systems (Space RAS) play a critical role in the current and future development of mission-defined machines that can survive in space while performing exploration, assembly, construction, maintenance and servicing tasks. They represent a multi-disciplinary emerging field at the intersection of space engineering, terrestrial robotics, computer science and materials. The field is essential to humankind's ability to explore or operate in space; providing greater access beyond human spaceflight limitations in the harsh environment of space, and offering greater operational handling that extends astronauts' capabilities. Space RAS covers all types of robotics for the exploration of planet surfaces as well as robotics used in orbit around the Earth and the sensors needed by the platform for navigation or control. Written by a team of International experts on space RAS, this book covers advanced research, technologies and applications including: sensing and perception to provide situational awareness for space robotic agents, explorers and assistants; mobility to reach and operate at sites of scientific interest on extra-terrestrial surfaces or free space environments using locomotion; manipulations to make intentional changes in the environment or objects using locomotion such as placing, assembling, digging, trenching, drilling, sampling, grappling and berthing; high-level autonomy for system and sub-systems to provide robust and safe autonomous navigation, rendezvous and docking capabilities and to enable extended-duration operations without human interventions to improve overall performance of human and robotic missions; human-robot interaction and multi-modal interaction; system engineering to provide a framework for understanding and coordinating the complex interactions of robots and achieving the desired system requirements; verification and validation of complex adaptive systems; modelling and simulation; and safety and trust.

This book compiles some of the latest research in cooperation between robots and sensor networks. Structured in twelve chapters, this book addresses fundamental, theoretical, implementation and experimentation issues. The chapters are organized into four parts namely multi-robots systems, data fusion and localization, security and dependability, and mobility.

This book explores novel aspects of social robotics, spoken dialogue systems, human-robot interaction, spoken language understanding, multimodal communication, and system evaluation. It offers a variety of perspectives on and solutions to the most important questions about advanced techniques for social robots and chat systems. Chapters by leading researchers address key research and development topics in the field of spoken dialogue systems, focusing in particular on three special themes: dialogue state tracking, evaluation of human-robot dialogue in social robotics, and socio-cognitive language processing. The book offers a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in both academia and industry whose work involves advanced interaction technology and who are seeking an up-to-date overview of the key topics. It also provides supplementary educational material for courses on state-of-the-art dialogue system technologies, social robotics, and related research fields.