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 book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th Latin American Robotics Symposium and Third Brazilian Symposium on Robotics, LARS 2015 / SBR 2015, held in Uberlandia, Brazil, in October/November 2015. The 17 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 80 submissions. The selected papers present a complete and solid reference of the state-of-the-art of intelligent robotics and automation research, covering the following areas: autonomous mobile robots, tele-operated and telepresence robots, human-robot interaction, trajectory control for mobile robots, autonomous vehicles, service-oriented robotic systems, semantic mapping, environment mapping, visual odometry, applications of RGB-D sensors, humanoid and biped robots, Robocup soccer robots, robot control, path planning, multiple vehicles and teams of robots.

Mechatronics, as the integrating framework of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer technology, control engineering and automation forms a crucial part in the design, manufacture and maintenance of a wide range of engineering products and processes. The mechatronics itself changes rapidly in last decade, from original mixture of subfields into original approach in engineering as a technical discipline. The book you are holding is aimed to help the reader to orient in this evolving field of science and technology. "Mechatronics 2013: Recent Technological and Scientific Advances" is the fourth volume following the previous editions in 2007, 2009 and 2011, providing the comprehensive and accessible coverage of advances in mechatronics presented on the 10th International Conference Mechatronics 2013, hosted this year at the Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic. The contributions, that passed the thorough review process, give an insight into current trends in research and development among Mechatronics 2013 contributing countries, with paper topics covering design and modeling of mechatronic systems, control and automation, signal processing, robotics and others, keeping in mind the innovation benefits of mechatronics design approach, leading to the development, production and daily use of machines and devices possessing a certain degree of computer based intelligence.

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 presents techniques that enable mobile manipulation robots to autonomously adapt to new situations. Covers kinematic modeling and learning; self-calibration; tactile sensing and object recognition; imitation learning and programming by demonstration.

This thesis proposes an effective methodology for enhancing the perceptual capabilities and achieving interaction control of the iCub humanoid robot. The method is based on the integration of measurements from different sensors (force/torque, inertial and tactile sensors) distributed along the robot's kinematic chain. Humanoid robots require a substantial amount of sensor information to create their own representations of the surrounding environment. Tactile perception is of primary importance for the exploration process. Also in humans, the tactile system is completely functional at birth. In humanoid robotics, the measurements of forces and torques that the robot exchanges with its surroundings are essential for safe interaction with the environment and with humans. The approach proposed in this thesis can successfully enhance the perceptual capabilities of robots by exploiting only a limited number of both localized and distributed sensors, providing a feasible and convenient solution for achieving active compliance control of humanoid robots.

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.

Provides insights into current research on robots from different disciplinary angles with a particular focus on a value-driven design. Includes contributions from designers, psychologists, engineers, philosophers, artists, and legal scholars, among others.

"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.

The present book includes a set of selected papers from the tenth “International Conference on Informatics in Control Automation and Robotics� (ICINCO 2013), held in Reykjavík, Iceland, from 29 to 31 July 2013. The conference was organized in four simultaneous tracks: “Intelligent Control Systems and Optimization�, “Robotics and Automation�, “Signal Processing, Sensors, Systems Modeling and Control� and “Industrial Engineering, Production and Management�. The book is based on the same structure. ICINCO 2013 received 255 paper submissions from 50 countries, in all continents. After a double blind paper review performed by the Program Committee only 30% were published and presented orally. A further refinement was made after the conference, based also on the assessment of presentation quality, so that this book includes the extended and revised versions of the very best papers of ICINCO 2013.

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.

The book is the follow-up to its predecessor "Automation, Communication and Cybernetics in Science and Engineering 2009/2010" and includes a representative selection of all scientific publications published between 07/2011 and 06/2012 in various books, journals and conference proceedings by the researchers of the following institute cluster: IMA - Institute of Information Management in Mechanical Engineering ZLW - Center for Learning and Knowledge Management IfU - Associated Institute for Management Cybernetics Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, RWTH Aachen University Innovative fields of application, such as cognitive systems, autonomous truck convoys, telemedicine, ontology engineering, knowledge and information management, learning models and technologies, organizational development and management cybernetics are presented.

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.

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.