Some Key Issues in Remote Handling M. Becquet TELEMAN: A European Communities Robotics Programme for the Nuclear Industry B. Tolley 7 Practical Experience Using Teleoperated Technology: Teleoperated Devices Used in an Accelerator Coraplex R. Horne 15 Artificial Realities Techniques for Teleoperation of Robotic Systems D. Marini 21 Robot Motion Planning: A Survey C. Torras 27 Autonomous Mobile Robots and Teleoperation J. del R. MilZCm, C. Torms and M. Becquet 41 Kinematic Calibration in Remote Handling and Teleoperation Environment J. -M. Renders 55 Transporters for Teleoperations in JET T. Raimondi 87 Nuclear Teleoperation. Particular Challenges in Decommissioning Applications M. Decreton 109 Manipulators Mascot IV Used in JET and Prospects of Enhancement T. Raimondi and L. Galbiati 139 Position Sensing for Advanced Teleoperation in Nuclear Environment M. Decreton 163 Advanced Telerobotic Systems. Single-Master Multi-SLave Manipulator System and Cellular Robotic System T. Fukuda and K. Kosuge 195 Introduction to Robotics and Computer Vision J. E. Besanqon 209 The NET Remote Maintenance Programme D. Maisonnier and T. Reeve 243 Color Plates 259 Preface The solution to today's demand for safety in Industrial Processes and Plants involves more and more the use of teleoperated devices to avoid human exposure to hazards. Such hazards occur during operation and maintenance, in normal or accidental conditions, and during decommissioning at the end of the life time of installations. The year 1989 has represented, for Teleoperation, an important landmark with the closure of the first commercial nuclear power stations which have reached the end of their life time.

Robotics is a modern interdisciplinary field that has emerged from the marriage of computerized numerical control and remote manipulation. Today's robotic systems have intelligence features, and are able to perform dexterous and intelligent human-like actions through appropriate combination of learning, perception, planning, decision making and control. This book presents advanced concepts, techniques and applications reflecting the experience of a wide group of specialists in the field. Topics include: kinematics, dynamics, path planning and tracking, control, mobile robotics, navigation, robot programming, and sophisticated applications in the manufacturing, medical, and other areas.

Nonholonomic Motion Planning grew out of the workshop that took place at the 1991 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. It consists of contributed chapters representing new developments in this area. Contributors to the book include robotics engineers, nonlinear control experts, differential geometers and applied mathematicians. Nonholonomic Motion Planning is arranged into three chapter groups: Controllability: one of the key mathematical tools needed to study nonholonomic motion. Motion Planning for Mobile Robots: in this section the papers are focused on problems with nonholonomic velocity constraints as well as constraints on the generalized coordinates. Falling Cats, Space Robots and Gauge Theory: there are numerous connections to be made between symplectic geometry techniques for the study of holonomies in mechanics, gauge theory and control. In this section these connections are discussed using the backdrop of examples drawn from space robots and falling cats reorienting themselves. Nonholonomic Motion Planning can be used either as a reference for researchers working in the areas of robotics, nonlinear control and differential geometry, or as a textbook for a graduate level robotics or nonlinear control course.

Neural Networks in Robotics is the first book to present an integrated view of both the application of artificial neural networks to robot control and the neuromuscular models from which robots were created. The behavior of biological systems provides both the inspiration and the challenge for robotics. The goal is to build robots which can emulate the ability of living organisms to integrate perceptual inputs smoothly with motor responses, even in the presence of novel stimuli and changes in the environment. The ability of living systems to learn and to adapt provides the standard against which robotic systems are judged. In order to emulate these abilities, a number of investigators have attempted to create robot controllers which are modelled on known processes in the brain and musculo-skeletal system. Several of these models are described in this book. On the other hand, connectionist (artificial neural network) formulations are attractive for the computation of inverse kinematics and dynamics of robots, because they can be trained for this purpose without explicit programming. Some of the computational advantages and problems of this approach are also presented. For any serious student of robotics, Neural Networks in Robotics provides an indispensable reference to the work of major researchers in the field. Similarly, since robotics is an outstanding application area for artificial neural networks, Neural Networks in Robotics is equally important to workers in connectionism and to students for sensormonitor control in living systems.

Over the last twenty years, automation and robotics have played an increasingly important role in a variety of application domains including manufacturing, hazardous environments, defense, and service industries. Space is a unique environment where power, communications, atmospheric, gravitational, and sensing conditions impose harsh constraints on the ability of both man and machines to function productively. In this environment, intelligent automation and robotics are essential complements to the capabilities of humans. In the development of the United States Space Program, robotic manipulation systems have increased in importance as the complexity of space missions has grown. Future missions will require the construction, maintenance, and repair of large structures, such as the space station. This volume presents the effords of several groups that are working on robotic solutions to this problem. Much of the work in this book is related to assembly in space, and especially in-orbit assembly of large truss structures. Many of these so-called truss structures will be assembled in orbit. It is expected that robot manipulators will be used exclusively, or at least provide partial assistance to humans. Intelligent Robotic Systems for Space Exploration provides detailed algorithms and analysis for assembly of truss structure in space. It reports on actual implementations to date done at NASA's Langley Research Center. The Johnson Space Center, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Other implementations and research done at Rensselaer are also reported. Analysis of robot control problems that are unique to a zero-gravity environment are presented.

Robotic technology offers two potential benefits for future space exploration. One benefit is minimizing the risk that astronauts face. The other benefit is increasing their productivity. Realizing the benefits of robotic technology in space will require solving several problems which are unique and now becoming active research topics. One of the most important research areas is dynamics, control, motion and planning for space robots by considering the dynamic interaction between the robot and the base (space station, space shuttle, or satellite). Any inefficiency in the planning and control can considerably risk by success of the space mission. Space Robotics: Dynamics and Control presents a collection of papers concerning fundamental problems in dynamics and control of space robots, focussing on issues relevant to dynamic base/robot interaction. The authors are all pioneers in theoretical analysis and experimental systems development of space robot technology. The chapters are organized within three problem areas: dynamics problems, nonholonomic nature problems, and control problems. This collection provides a solid reference for researchers in robotics, mechanics, control, and astronautical science.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Robotics in Smart Manufacturing, WRSM 2013, held in Porto, Portugal, in June 2013. The 20 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers address issues such as robotic machining, off-line robot programming, robot calibration, new robotic hardware and software architectures, advanced robot teaching methods, intelligent warehouses, robot co-workers and application of robots in the textile industry.

This book contains the proceedings of the ROBOT 2013: FIRST IBERIAN ROBOTICS CONFERENCE and it can be said that included both state of the art and more practical presentations dealing with implementation problems, support technologies and future applications. A growing interest in Assistive Robotics, Agricultural Robotics, Field Robotics, Grasping and Dexterous Manipulation, Humanoid Robots, Intelligent Systems and Robotics, Marine Robotics, has been demonstrated by the very relevant number of contributions. Moreover, ROBOT2013 incorporates a special session on Legal and Ethical Aspects in Robotics that is becoming a topic of key relevance. This Conference was held in Madrid (28-29 November 2013), organized by the Sociedad Espanola para la Investigacion y Desarrollo en Robotica (SEIDROB) and by the Centre for Automation and Robotics - CAR (Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM) and Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC)), along with the co-operation of Grupo Tematico de Robotica CEA-GTRob, "Sociedade Portuguesa de Robotica" (SPR), "Asociacion Espanola de Promocion de la Investigacion en Agentes Fisicos" (RedAF), and partially supported by "Comunidad de Madrid under RoboCity2030 Programme.""

Roboticsis undergoingamajortransformationinscopeanddimension.From a largelydominantindustrialfocus,roboticsis rapidly expandinginto human environments and vigorouslyengaged in its new challenges. Interacting with, assisting, serving, and exploring with humans, the emerging robots will - creasingly touch people and their lives. Beyond its impact on physical robots, the body of knowledge robotics has produced is revealing a much wider range of applications reaching across - verse research areas and scienti?c disciplines, such as: biomechanics, haptics, neurosciences, virtual simulation, animation, surgery, and sensor networks among others. In return, the challenges of the new emerging areas are pr- ing an abundant source of stimulation and insights for the ?eld of robotics. It is indeed at the intersection of disciplines that the most striking advances happen. TheSpringerTractsinAdvancedRobotics(STAR)isdevotedtobringingto the research community the latest advances in the robotics ?eld on the basis of their signi?cance and quality. Through a wide and timely dissemination of critical research developments in robotics, our objective with this series is to promotemoreexchangesandcollaborationsamongtheresearchersinthec- munity and contributeto further advancements inthis rapidlygrowing?eld. The monographwritten byAlejandro DizanVasquez Goveafocusesonthe practicalproblem of moving in a cluttered environment with pedestrians and vehicles. A frameworkbased on Hidden Markov models is developed to learn typical motion patterns which can be used to predict motion on the basis of sensor data. All the theoretical results have been implemented and validated with experiments, using both real and simulated data.

In this book, a generic model in as far as possible mathematical closed-formis developed that predicts the behavior of large self-organizing robot groups (robot swarms) based on their control algorithm. In addition, an extensive subsumption of the relatively young and distinctive interdisciplinary research field of swarm robotics is emphasized. The connection to many related fields is highlighted and the concepts and methods borrowed from these fields are described shortly.

As the use and relevance of robotics for countless scientific purposes grows all the time, research into the many diverse elements of the subject becomes ever more important and in demand. This volume examines in depth the most topical, complex issues of modelling and identification in robotics. The book is divided into three main parts. The !first part is devoted to robot dynamics modelling and identification of robot and load parameters, incorporating friction torques, discussing identification schemes, and presenting simulations and experiment al results of robot and load dynamic parameters identification. A general concept of robot programming language for research and educational purposes is examined and there is a detailed outline of its basic structures along with hardware requirements, which both constitute an open robot controller architecture. Finally a hybrid controller is derived, and several experimental results of this system are outlined. This impressive discussion of the topic covers both the theoretical and practical, illustrated throughout by examples and experimental results, and will be of value to anyone researching or practising within the field of robotics, automation and system i dentification or to control engineers.

Building a robot that learns to perform a task has been acknowledged as one of the major challenges facing artificial intelligence. Self-improving robots would relieve humans from much of the drudgery of programming and would potentially allow operation in environments that were changeable or only partially known. Progress towards this goal would also make fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence by furthering our understanding of how to successfully integrate disparate abilities such as perception, planning, learning and action. Although its roots can be traced back to the late fifties, the area of robot learning has lately seen a resurgence of interest. The flurry of interest in robot learning has partly been fueled by exciting new work in the areas of reinforcement earning, behavior-based architectures, genetic algorithms, neural networks and the study of artificial life. Robot Learning gives an overview of some of the current research projects in robot learning being carried out at leading universities and research laboratories in the United States. The main research directions in robot learning covered in this book include: reinforcement learning, behavior-based architectures, neural networks, map learning, action models, navigation and guided exploration.

Suitable for both senior-level and first-year graduate courses, this fully revised edition provides a unique and systematic treatment of engineering dynamics that covers Newton-Euler and Lagrangian approaches. New to this edition are: two completely revised chapters on the constraints on, and potential energies for, rigid bodies, and the dynamics of systems of particles and rigid bodies; clearer discussion on coordinate singularities and their relation to mass matrices and configuration manifolds; additional discussion of contravariant basis vectors and dual Euler basis vectors, as well as related works in robotics; improved coverage of navigation equations; inclusion of a 350-page solutions manual for instructors, available online; a fully updated reference list. Numerous structured examples, discussion of various applications, and exercises covering a wide range of topics are included throughout, and source code for exercises, and simulations of systems are available online.

From the reviews: "The book is an excellent combination of theory and real-world applications. Each application not only demonstrates the power of the theoretical results but also is important on its own behalf." IEEE Control Systems Magazine

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Social Robotics, ICSR 2013, held in Bristol, UK, in October 2013. The 55 revised full papers and 13 abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 108 submissions and are presented together with one invited paper. The papers cover topics such as human-robot interaction, child development and care for the elderly, as well as technical issues underlying social robotics: visual attention and processing, motor control and learning.

The 6th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS 2002) was held in June 2002 in Fukuoka, Japan, a decade after the first DARS symposium was convened. This book, containing the proceedings of the symposium, provides broad coverage of the technical issues in the current state of the art in distributed autonomous systems composed of multiple robots, robotic modules, or robotic agents. DARS 2002 dealt with new strategies for realizing complex, modular, robust, and fault-tolerant robotic systems, and this volume covers the technical areas of system design, modeling, simulation, operation, sensing, planning, and control. The papers that are included here were contributed by leading researchers from Asia, Oceania, Europe, and the Americas, and make up an invaluable resource for researchers and students in the field of distributed autonomous robotic systems.

This book includes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 15th Annual RoboCup International Symposium, held in Istanbul, Turkey, in July 2011. The 12 revised papers and 32 poster presentation presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 97 submissions. The papers are orginazed on topical sections on robot hardware and software, perception and action, robotic cognition and learning, multi-robot systems, human-robot interaction, education and edutainment and applications.

The author, who died in 1984, is well-known both as a person and through his research in mathematical logic and theoretical computer science. In the first part of the book he presents the new classical theory of finite automata as unary algebras which he himself invented about 30 years ago. Many results, like his work on structure lattices or his characterization of regular sets by generalized regular rules, are unknown to a wider audience. In the second part of the book he extends the theory to general (non-unary, many-sorted) algebras, term rewriting systems, tree automata, and pushdown automata. Essentially Buchi worked independent of other rersearch, following a novel and stimulating approach. He aimed for a mathematical theory of terms, but could not finish the book. Many of the results are known by now, but to work further along this line presents a challenging research program on the borderline between universal algebra, term rewriting systems, and automata theory. For the whole book and again within each chapter the author starts at an elementary level, giving careful explanations and numerous examples and exercises, and then leads up to the research level. In this way he covers the basic theory as well as many nonstandard subjects. Thus the book serves as a textbook for both the beginner and the advances student, and also as a rich source for the expert.

The ?eld of multi-sensor fusion and integration is growing into signi?cance as our societyisintransitionintoubiquitouscomputingenvironmentswithroboticservices everywhere under ambient intelligence. What surround us are to be the networks of sensors and actuators that monitor our environment, health, security and safety, as well as the service robots, intelligent vehicles, and autonomous systems of ever heightened autonomy and dependability with integrated heterogeneous sensors and actuators. The ?eld of multi-sensor fusion and integration plays key role for m- ing the above transition possible by providing fundamental theories and tools for implementation. This volume is an edition of the papers selected from the 7th IEEE International Conference on Multi-Sensor Integration and Fusion, IEEE MFI'08, held in Seoul, Korea, August 20-22, 2008. Only 32 papers out of the 122 papers accepted for IEEE MFI'08 were chosen and requested for revision and extension to be included in this volume. The 32 contributions to this volume are organized into three parts: Part I is dedicated to the Theories in Data and Information Fusion, Part II to the Multi-Sensor Fusion and Integration in Robotics and Vision, and Part III to the Applications to Sensor Networks and Ubiquitous Computing Environments. To help readers understand better, a part summary is included in each part as an introduction. The summaries of Parts I, II, and III are prepared respectively by Prof. Hanseok Ko, Prof. Sukhan Lee and Prof. Hernsoo Hahn.

How quickly the technological 'flavour of the month' changes. At the beginning of the 1980's many saw 'robotics' as being something of a pana cea for those problems in the manufacturing industries which had been exacerbated by the world recession. Those working at the time in the field of robotics stressed that robots themselves were only part of the solution. Yet in many quarters the 'hype' for the new technology apparently knew few bounds, resulting, inexorably, in many industries painfully discover ing for themselves a new realism, closely followed by disillusionment. In its wider sense the term 'robotics' covers an extremely broad spec trum of technologies ranging from extremely flexible, highly sensory and integrated systems capable of handling a very diverse product range, through to comparatively inflexible, high volume systems which can merely handle slightly different variations of the same basic product. As a result of the one 'buzzword' referring to such a variety of actual system types, the disillusionment which started to become apparent during the early 1980's acted as something of a double edged sword. A given com pany might consider a particular robotics-based technological solution to its production problems, find that it was unsuitable, and so renounce all robotics approaches as inappropriate. Yet just because one position on that spectrum of technological solutions was unsuitable for the company should not have led them to assume that there was no other robotics solu tion that was appropriate."

The microelectronics market, with special emphasis to the production of complex mixed-signal systems-on-chip (SoC), is driven by three main dynamics, time-- market, productivity and managing complexity. Pushed by the progress in na- meter technology, the design teams are facing a curve of complexity that grows exponentially, thereby slowing down the productivity design rate. Analog design automation tools are not developing at the same pace of technology, once custom design, characterized by decisions taken at each step of the analog design flow, - lies most of the time on designer knowledge and expertise. Actually, the use of - sign management platforms, like the Cadences Virtuoso platform, with a set of - tegrated CAD tools and database facilities to deal with the design transformations from the system level to the physical implementation, can significantly speed-up the design process and enhance the productivity of analog/mixed-signal integrated circuit (IC) design teams. These design management platforms are a valuable help in analog IC design but they are still far behind the development stage of design automation tools already available for digital design. Therefore, the development of new CAD tools and design methodologies for analog and mixed-signal ICs is ess- tial to increase the designer's productivity and reduce design productivitygap. The work presented in this book describes a new design automation approach to the problem of sizing analog ICs.

Germany and Japan are two of the worldwide leading countries in robotics research. Robotics as a key technology introduces technical as well as philosophical and cultural challenges. How can we use robots that have a human-like appearance in everyday life? Are there limits to technology? What are the cultural similarities and differences between Germany and Japan? These are some of the questions which are discussed in the book. Five chapters comprehend an intercultural and interdisciplinary framework including current research fields like Roboethics, Hermeneutics of Technologies, Technology Assessment, Robotics in Japanese Popular Culture and Music Robots. Contributions on cultural interrelations, technical visions and essays round out the content of this book.