The topics addressed in this book cover the whole range of kinematic analysis, synthesis and design and consider robotic systems possessing serial, parallel and cable driven mechanisms. The robotic systems range from being less than fully mobile to kinematically redundant to over constrained. The fifty-six contributions report the latest results in robot kinematics with emphasis on emerging areas such as design and control of humanoids or humanoid subsystems. The book is of interest to researchers wanting to bring their knowledge up to date regarding modern topics in one of the basic disciplines in robotics, which relates to the essential property of robots, the motion of mechanisms.

Soft computing, intelligent robotics and control are in the core interest of contemporary engineering. Essential characteristics of soft computing methods are the ability to handle vague information, to apply human-like reasoning, their learning capability and ease of application. Soft computing techniques are widely applied in the control of dynamic systems, including mobile robots. The present volume is a collection of 20 chapters written by respectable experts of the fields, addressing various theoretical and practical aspects in soft computing, intelligent robotics and control. The first part of the book concerns with issues of intelligent robotics, including robust xed point transformation design, experimental verification of the input-output feedback linearization of differentially driven mobile robot and applying kinematic synthesis to micro electro-mechanical systems design. The second part of the book is devoted to fundamental aspects of soft computing. This includes practical aspects of fuzzy rule interpolation, subjective weights based meta learning in multi criteria decision making, swarm-based heuristics for an area exploration and knowledge driven adaptive product representations. The last part addresses different problems, issues and methods of applied mathematics. This includes perturbation estimates for invariant subspaces of Hessenberg matrices, uncertainty and nonlinearity modelling by probabilistic metric spaces and comparison and visualization of the DNA of six primates.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of the human dimension of social robots by discussing both transnational features and national peculiarities. Addressing several issues that explore the human side of social robots, this book investigates what a social robot is and how we might come to think about social robots in the different areas of everyday life. Organized around three sections that deal with Perceptions and Attitudes to Social Robots, Human Interaction with Social Robots, and Social Robots in Everyday Life, it explores the idea that even if the challenges of robot technologies can be overcome from a technological perspective, the question remains as to what kind of machine we want to have and use in our daily lives. Lessons learned from previous widely adopted technologies, such as smartphones, indicate that robot technologies could potentially be absorbed into the everyday lives of humans in such a way that it is the human that determines the human-machine interaction. In a similar way to how today's information and communication technologies were initially designed for professional/industrial use, but were soon commercialized for the mass market and then personalized by humans in the course of daily practice, the use of social robots is now facing the same revolution of 'domestication.' In the context of this transformation, which involves the profound embedding of robots in everyday life, the 'human' aspect of social robots will play a major part. This book sheds new light on this highly topical issue, one of the central subjects that will be taught and studied at universities worldwide and that will be discussed widely, publicly and repeatedly in the near future.

This book presents the latest scientific research related to the field of Robotics. It involves different topics such as biomedicine, energy efficiency and home automation and robotics. The book is written by technical experts and researchers from academia and industry working on robotics applications. The book could be used as supplementary material for courses related to Robotics and Domotics.

This book presents the state of the art in reinforcement learning applied to robotics both in terms of novel algorithms and applications. It discusses recent approaches that allow robots to learn motor. skills and presents tasks that need to take into account the dynamic behavior of the robot and its environment, where a kinematic movement plan is not sufficient. The book illustrates a method that learns to generalize parameterized motor plans which is obtained by imitation or reinforcement learning, by adapting a small set of global parameters and appropriate kernel-based reinforcement learning algorithms. The presented applications explore highly dynamic tasks and exhibit a very efficient learning process. All proposed approaches have been extensively validated with benchmarks tasks, in simulation and on real robots. These tasks correspond to sports and games but the presented techniques are also applicable to more mundane household tasks. The book is based on the first author’s doctoral thesis, which won the 2013 EURON Georges Giralt PhD Award.

This volume gathers the peer reviewed papers which were presented at the third edition of the International Workshop “Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-agent Manufacturing and Robotics – SOHOMA’13� organized on June 20-22, 2013 by the Centre of Research in Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Robotics – CIMR Bucharest, and hosted by the University of Valenciennes, France. The book is structured in five parts, each one covering a specific research domain which represents a trend for modern manufacturing control: Distributed Intelligence for Sustainable Manufacturing, Holonic and Multi-Agent Technologies for Manufacturing Planning and Control; Service Orientation in Manufacturing Management and Control, Intelligent Products and Product-driven Automation and Robotics for Manufacturing and Services. These five evolution lines have in common concepts related to service orientation in a distributed planning and control agent-based industrial environment; today it is generally recognized that the Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture paradigm has been looked upon as a suitable and effective approach for industrial automation and management of manufacturing enterprises.

Micro/Nano Robotics and Automation technologies have rapidly grown associated with the growth of Micro and Nanotechnologies. This book presents a summary of fundamentals in micro-nano scale engineering and the current state of the art of these technologies. "Micro-Nanorobotic Manipulation Systems and their Applications" introduces these advanced technologies from the basics and applications aspects of Micro/Nano-Robotics and Automation from the prospective micro/nano-scale manipulation. The book is organized in 9 chapters including an overview chapter of Micro/Nanorobotics and Automation technology from the historical view and important related research works. Further chapters are devoted to the physics of micro-nano fields as well as to material and science, microscopes, fabrication technology, importance of biological cell, and control techniques. Furthermore important examples, applications and a concise summary of Micro-Nanorobotics and Automation technologies are given.

This unique book provides a bridge between digital control theory and vehicle guidance and control practice. It presents practical techniques of digital redesign and direct discrete-time design suitable for a real-time implementation of controllers and guidance laws at multiple rates and with and computational techniques. The theory of digital control is given as theorems, lemmas, and propositions. The design of the digital guidance and control systems is illustrated by means of step-by-step procedures, algorithms, and case studies. The systems proposed are applied to realistic models of unmanned systems and missiles, and digital implementation.

This book covers all aspects of robot intelligence from perception at sensor level and reasoning at cognitive level to behavior planning at execution level for each low level segment of the machine. It also presents the technologies for cognitive reasoning, social interaction with humans, behavior generation, ability to cooperate with other robots, ambience awareness, and an artificial genome that can be passed on to other robots. These technologies are to materialize cognitive intelligence, social intelligence, behavioral intelligence, collective intelligence, ambient intelligence and genetic intelligence. The book aims at serving researchers and practitioners with a timely dissemination of the recent progress on robot intelligence technology and its applications, based on a collection of papers presented at the 3rd International Conference on Robot Intelligence Technology and Applications (RiTA), held in Beijing, China, November 6 - 8, 2014. For better readability, this edition has the total 74 papers grouped into 3 chapters: Chapter I: Ambient, Behavioral, Cognitive, Collective, and Social Robot Intelligence, Chapter II: Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Design for Advanced Robotics, Chapter III: Applications of Robot Intelligence Technology, where individual chapters, edited respectively by Peter Sincak, Hyun Myung, Jun Jo along with Weimin Yang and Jong-Hwan Kim, begin with a brief introduction written by the respective chapter editors.

This book presents recent progresses in control, automation, robotics and measuring techniques. It includes contributions of top experts in the fields, focused on both theory and industrial practice. The particular chapters present a deep analysis of a specific technical problem which is in general followed by a numerical analysis and simulation and results of an implementation for the solution of a real world problem. The presented theoretical results, practical solutions and guidelines will be useful for both researchers working in the area of engineering sciences and for practitioners solving industrial problems.

The overall structure of this new edition is three-tier: Part I presents the basics, Part II is concerned with methodological issues, and Part III discusses advanced topics. In the second edition the authors have reorganized the material to focus on problems, how to represent them, and then how to choose and design algorithms for different representations. They also added a chapter on problems, reflecting the overall book focus on problem-solvers, a chapter on parameter tuning, which they combined with the parameter control and "how-to" chapters into a methodological part, and finally a chapter on evolutionary robotics with an outlook on possible exciting developments in this field. The book is suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in artificial intelligence and computational intelligence, and for self-study by practitioners and researchers engaged with all aspects of bioinspired design and optimization.

"Proceedings of the 2013 Chinese Intelligent Automation Conference" presents selected research papers from the CIAC'13, held in Yangzhou, China. The topics include e.g. adaptive control, fuzzy control, neural network based control, knowledge based control, hybrid intelligent control, learning control, evolutionary mechanism based control, multi-sensor integration, failure diagnosis, and reconfigurable control. Engineers and researchers from academia, industry, and government can gain an inside view of new solutions combining ideas from multiple disciplines in the field of intelligent automation.
Zengqi Sun and Zhidong Deng are professors at the Department of Computer Science, Tsinghua University, China.

Mobile Robotics offers comprehensive coverage of the essentials of the field suitable for both students and practitioners. Adapted from Alonzo Kelly's graduate and undergraduate courses, the content of the book reflects current approaches to developing effective mobile robots. Professor Kelly adapts principles and techniques from the fields of mathematics, physics, and numerical methods to present a consistent framework in a notation that facilitates learning and highlights relationships between topics. This text was developed specifically to be accessible to senior level undergraduates in engineering and computer science, and includes supporting exercises to reinforce the lessons of each section. Practitioners will value Kelly's perspectives on practical applications of these principles. Complex subjects are reduced to implementable algorithms extracted from real systems wherever possible, to enhance the real-world relevance of the text.

Parallel structures are more effective than serial ones for industrial automation applications that require high precision and stiffness, or a high load capacity relative to robot weight. Although many industrial applications have adopted parallel structures for their design, few textbooks introduce the analysis of such robots in terms of dynamics and control. Filling this gap, Parallel Robots: Mechanics and Control presents a systematic approach to analyze the kinematics, dynamics, and control of parallel robots. It brings together analysis and design tools for engineers and researchers who want to design and implement parallel structures in industry. Covers Kinematics, Dynamics, and Control in One Volume The book begins with the representation of motion of robots and the kinematic analysis of parallel manipulators. Moving beyond static positioning, it then examines a systematic approach to performing Jacobian analysis. A special feature of the book is its detailed coverage of the dynamics and control of parallel manipulators. The text examines dynamic analysis using the Newton-Euler method, the principle of virtual work, and the Lagrange formulations. Finally, the book elaborates on the control of parallel robots, considering both motion and force control. It introduces various model-free and model-based controllers and develops robust and adaptive control schemes. It also addresses redundancy resolution schemes in detail. Analysis and Design Tools to Help You Create Parallel Robots In each chapter, the author revisits the same case studies to show how the techniques may be applied. The case studies include a planar cable-driven parallel robot, part of a promising new generation of parallel structures that will allow for larger workspaces. The MATLAB (R) code used for analysis and simulation is available online. Combining the analysis of kinematics and dynamics with methods of designing controllers, this text offers a holistic introduction for anyone interested in designing and implementing parallel robots.

This volume of Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing contains papers presented in the main track of IITI 2016, the First International Conference on Intelligent Information Technologies for Industry held in May 16-21 in Sochi, Russia. The conference was jointly co-organized by Rostov State Transport University (Russia) and VSB - Technical University of Ostrava (Czech Republic) with the participation of Russian Association for Artificial Intelligence (RAAI) and Russian Association for Fuzzy Systems and Soft Computing (RAFSSC). The volume is devoted to practical models and industrial applications related to intelligent information systems. The conference has been a meeting point for researchers and practitioners to enable the implementation of advanced information technologies into various industries. Nevertheless, some theoretical talks concerning the-state-of-the-art in intelligent systems and soft computing are included in the proceedings as well.

This book presents recent progresses in control, automation, robotics, and measuring techniques. It includes contributions of top experts in the fields, focused on both theory and industrial practice. The particular chapters present a deep analysis of a specific technical problem which is in general followed by a numerical analysis and simulation and results of an implementation for the solution of a real world problem. The presented theoretical results, practical solutions and guidelines will be useful for both researchers working in the area of engineering sciences and for practitioners solving industrial problems.

Autonomy for Marine Robots provides a timely and insightful overview of intelligent autonomy in marine robots. A brief history of this emerging field is provided, along with a discussion of the challenges unique to the underwater environment and their impact on the level of intelligent autonomy required. Topics covered at length examine advanced frameworks, path-planning, fault tolerance, machine learning, and cooperation as relevant to marine robots that need intelligent autonomy.

In order to enable a better understanding of the key concepts of automation, this book develops the fundamental aspects of the field while also proposing numerous concrete exercises and their solutions. The theoretical approach that it presents fundamentally uses the state space and makes it possible to process general and complex systems in a simple way, involving several switches and sensors of different types. This approach requires the use of developed theoretical tools such as linear algebra, analysis and physics, generally taught in preparatory classes for specialist engineering courses.

This book contains a selection of papers accepted for presentation and discussion at ROBOT 2015: Second Iberian Robotics Conference, held in Lisbon, Portugal, November 19th-21th, 2015. ROBOT 2015 is part of a series of conferences that are a joint organization of SPR - "Sociedade Portuguesa de Robotica/ Portuguese Society for Robotics", SEIDROB - Sociedad Espanola para la Investigacion y Desarrollo de la Robotica/ Spanish Society for Research and Development in Robotics and CEA-GTRob - Grupo Tematico de Robotica/ Robotics Thematic Group. The conference organization had also the collaboration of several universities and research institutes, including: University of Minho, University of Porto, University of Lisbon, Polytechnic Institute of Porto, University of Aveiro, University of Zaragoza, University of Malaga, LIACC, INESC-TEC and LARSyS. Robot 2015 was focussed on the Robotics scientific and technological activities in the Iberian Peninsula, although open to research and delegates from other countries. The conference featured 19 special sessions, plus a main/general robotics track. The special sessions were about: Agricultural Robotics and Field Automation; Autonomous Driving and Driver Assistance Systems; Communication Aware Robotics; Environmental Robotics; Social Robotics: Intelligent and Adaptable AAL Systems; Future Industrial Robotics Systems; Legged Locomotion Robots; Rehabilitation and Assistive Robotics; Robotic Applications in Art and Architecture; Surgical Robotics; Urban Robotics; Visual Perception for Autonomous Robots; Machine Learning in Robotics; Simulation and Competitions in Robotics; Educational Robotics; Visual Maps in Robotics; Control and Planning in Aerial Robotics, the XVI edition of the Workshop on Physical Agents and a Special Session on Technological Transfer and Innovation.

This proceeding is a compilation of selected papers from the 8th International Workshop of Advanced Manufacturing and Automation (IWAMA 2018), held in Changzhou, China on September 25 - 26, 2018. Most of the topics are focusing on novel techniques for manufacturing and automation in Industry 4.0 and smart factory. These contributions are vital for maintaining and improving economic development and quality of life. The proceeding will assist academic researchers and industrial engineers to implement the concepts and theories of Industry 4.0 in industrial practice, in order to effectively respond to the challenges posed by the 4th industrial revolution and smart factory.

This book addresses dynamic modelling methodology and analyses of tree-type robotic systems. Such analyses are required to visualize the motion of a system without really building it. The book contains novel treatment of the tree-type systems using concept of kinematic modules and the corresponding Decoupled Natural Orthogonal Complements (DeNOC), unified representation of the multiple-degrees-of freedom-joints, efficient recursive dynamics algorithms, and detailed dynamic analyses of several legged robots. The book will help graduate students, researchers and practicing engineers in applying their knowledge of dynamics for analysis of complex robotic systems. The knowledge contained in the book will help one in virtual testing of robot operation, trajectory planning and control.

This book covers all topics relevant for the design of haptic interfaces and teleoperation systems. The book provides the basic knowledge required for understanding more complex approaches and more importantly it introduces all issues that must be considered for designing efficient and safe haptic interfaces. Topics covered in this book provide insight into all relevant components of a haptic system. The reader is guided from understanding the virtual reality concept to the final goal of being able to design haptic interfaces for specific tasks such as nanomanipulation. The introduction chapter positions the haptic interfaces within the virtual reality context. In order to design haptic interfaces that will comply with human capabilities at least basic understanding of human sensors-motor system is required. An overview of this topic is provided in the chapter related to human haptics. The book does not try to introduce the state-of-the-art haptic interface solutions because these tend to change quickly. Only a careful selection of different kinematic configurations is shown to introduce the reader into this field. Mathematical models of virtual environment, collision detection and force rendering topics are strongly interrelated and are described in the next two chapters. The interaction with the virtual environment is simulated with a haptic interface. Impedance and admittance based approaches to haptic robot control are presented. Stability issues of haptic interaction are analyzed in details and solutions are proposed for guaranteeing stable and safe operation. Finally, haptic interaction is extended to teleoperation systems. Virtual fixtures which improve the teleoperation and human-robot cooperation in complex environments are covered next and the last chapter presents nanomanipulation as one specific example of teleoperation.

This volume of Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing contains papers presented in the main track of IITI 2016, the First International Conference on Intelligent Information Technologies for Industry held in May 16-21 in Sochi, Russia. The conference was jointly co-organized by Rostov State Transport University (Russia) and VSB - Technical University of Ostrava (Czech Republic) with the participation of Russian Association for Artificial Intelligence (RAAI) and Russian Association for Fuzzy Systems and Soft Computing (RAFSSC). The volume is devoted to practical models and industrial applications related to intelligent information systems. The conference has been a meeting point for researchers and practitioners to enable the implementation of advanced information technologies into various industries. Nevertheless, some theoretical talks concerning the-state-of-the-art in intelligent systems and soft computing are included in the proceedings as well.

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.

The book "Mechatronics: Recent Technological and Scientific Advances" provides comprehensive and accessible coverage of the evolving disciplines of mechatronics for nanotechnology, automatic control & robotics, biomedical engineering, design manufacturing and testing of MEMS, metrology, photonics, mechatronic products majors. It is already the third volume following the previous editions in 2007 and 2009 providing a recent state of advances in mechatronics presented on the 9th International Conference Mechatronics 2011, hosted this year at the Faculty of Mechatronics, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland. The carefully selected contributions give an insight into the current development of these scientific disciplines, present the new results of research and development and indicate the trends of development in the interdisciplinary field of mechatronics systems. Even though many people believe that the presence of mechanical, electrical, electronic components, and computers make a system mechatronics, others do not feel the same as there is nothing wrong with the individual identity. The enclosed material is original, and reflects the main research tendencies and developments in mechatronics among Mechatronics 2011 contributing countries. It helps to acquire the mix of skills needed to comprehend and design mechatronic systems and also provides with the frame of understanding to develop a truly interdisciplinary and integrated approach to engineering. The enclosed material is original, and reflects the main research tendencies and developments in mechatronics among Mechatronics 2011 contributing countries. It helps to acquire the mix of skills needed to comprehend and design mechatronic systems and also provides with the frame of understanding to develop a truly interdisciplinary and integrated approach to engineering.