This book presents the most recent research advances in the theory, design, control and application of robotic systems, which are intended for a variety of purposes such as manipulation, manufacturing, automation, surgery, locomotion and biomechanics. The issues addressed are fundamentally kinematic in nature, including synthesis, calibration, redundancy, force control, dexterity, inverse and forward kinematics, kinematic singularities, as well as over-constrained systems. Methods used include line geometry, quaternion algebra, screw algebra, and linear algebra. These methods are applied to both parallel and serial multi-degree-of-freedom systems. The results should interest researchers, teachers and students, in fields of engineering and mathematics related to robot theory, design, control and application. All articles in the book were reported at the seventh international symposium on Advances in Robot Kinematics that was organised in June 2000 in the beautiful ancient Mediterranean town of Piran in Slovenia. The preceding symposia of the series took place in Ljubljana (1988), Linz (1990), Ferrara (1992), Ljubljana (1994), and Piran (1996), and Salzburg (1998).

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.

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 increasing presence of mobile robots in our everyday lives introduces the requirements for their intelligent and autonomous features. Therefore the next generation of mobile robots should be more self-capable, in respect to: increasing of their functionality in unforeseen situations, decreasing of the human involvement in their everyday operations and their maintenance; being robust; fault tolerant and reliable in their operation. Although mobile robotic systems have been a topic of research for decades and aside the technology improvements nowadays, the subject on how to program and making them more autonomous in their operations is still an open field for research. Applying bio-inspired, organic approaches in robotics domain is one of the methodologies that are considered that would help on making the robots more autonomous and self-capable, i.e. having properties such as: self-reconfiguration, self-adaptation, self-optimization, etc. In this book several novel biologically inspired approaches for walking robots (multi-legged and humanoid) domain are introduced and elaborated. They are related to self-organized and self-stabilized robot walking, anomaly detection within robot systems using self-adaptation, and mitigating the faulty robot conditions by self-reconfiguration of a multi-legged walking robot. The approaches presented have been practically evaluated in various test scenarios, the results from the experiments are discussed in details and their practical usefulness is validated.

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 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.""

Understand the design, testing, and application of cleanroom robotics and automation with this practical guide. From the history and evolution of cleanroom automation to the latest applications and industry standards, this book provides the only complete overview of the topic available. With over 20 years' industry experience in robotics design, Karl Mathia provides numerous real-world examples to enable you to learn from professional experience, maximize the design quality and avoid expensive design pitfalls. You'll also get design guidelines and hands-on tips for reducing design time and cost. Compliance with industry and de-facto standards for design, assembly, and handling is stressed throughout, and detailed discussions of recommended materials for atmospheric and vacuum robots are included to help shorten product development cycles and avoid expensive material testing. This book is the perfect practical reference for engineers working with robotics for electronics manufacturing in a range of industries that rely on cleanroom manufacturing.

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.

Two central ideas in the movement toward advanced automation systems are the office-of-the-future (or office automation system), and the factory of-the-future (or factory automation system). An office automation system is an integrated system with diversified office equipment, communication devices, intelligent terminals, intelligent copiers, etc., for providing information management and control in a dis tributed office environment. A factory automation system is also an inte grated system with programmable machine tools, robots, and other pro cess equipment such as new "peripherals," for providing manufacturing information management and control. Such advanced automation systems can be regarded as the response to the demand for greater variety, greater flexibility, customized designs, rapid response, and 'Just-in-time" delivery of office services or manufac tured goods. The economy of scope, which allows the production of a vari ety of similar products in random order, gradually replaces the economy of scale derived from overall volume of operations. In other words, we are gradually switching from the production of large volumes of standard products to systems for the production of a wide variety of similar products in small batches. This is the phenomenon of "demassification" of the marketplace, as described by Alvin Toffier in The Third Wave."

The use of sensor's with machines, whether to control them continuously or to inspect and verify their operation, can be highly cost-effective in particular areas of industrial automation. Examples of such areas include sensing systems to monitor tool condition, force and torque sensing for robot assembly systems, vision-based automatic inspection, and tracking sensor's for robot arc welding and seam sealing. Many think these will be the basis of an important future industry. So far, design of sensor systems to meet these needs has been (in the interest of cheapness) rather ad hoc and carefully tailored to the application both as to the transducer hardware and the associated processing software. There are now, however, encouraging signs of commonality emerging between different sensor application areas. For instance, many commercial vision systems and some tactile systems just emerging from research are able to use more or less standardized techniques for two-dimensional image processing and shape representation. Structured-light triangulation systems can be applied with relatively minor hardware and software variations to measure three-dimensional profiles of objects as diverse as individual soldered joints, body pressings, and weldments. Sensors make it possible for machines to recover 'sensibly' from errors, and standard software proce dures such as expert systems can now be applied to facilitate this."

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.

Testbeds are gaining increasing relevance in research domains and also in industrial applications. However, very few books devoted to testbeds have been published. To the best of my knowledge no book on this topic has been published. This book is particularly interesting for the growing community of testbed developers. I believe the book is also very interesting for researchers in robot-WSN cooperation. This book provides detailed description of a system that can be considered the first testbed that allows full peer-to-peer interoperability between heterogeneous robots and ubiquitous systems such as Wireless Sensor Networks, camera networks and pervasive computing systems. The system architecture includes modules that allows full bidirectional communication between robots and WSN. One robot can The book describes the current state of the art in development of testbeds integrating Cooperating Object technologies. It describes in detail the testbed specification and design using requirements extracted from surveys among experts in robotics and ubiquitous systems in academia and industry. The book also describes the testbed novel architecture and its hardware and software components. Moreover, it includes details on user support tools to facilitate its use such as remote use using a virtual private network and sets of functionalities of interest for members from the robotics, WSN and robot-WSN communities. Finally, the book illustrates its capabilities and potentialities describing the implementation of some of the experiments that have been performed. Examples from the robotics, WSN and robot-WSN communities are described.

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.

It is widely anticipated that autonomous vehicles will have a transformational impact on military forces and will play a key role in many future force structures. As a result, many tasks have already been identified that unmanned systems could undertake more readily than humans. However, for this to occur, such systems will need to be agile, versatile, persistent, reliable, survivable and lethal. This will require many of the vehicles 'cognitive' or higher order functions to be more fully developed, whereas to date only the 'component' or physical functions have been successfully automated and deployed. The book draws upon a broad range of others' work with a view to providing a product that is greater than the sum of its parts. The discussion is intentionally approached from the perspective of improving understanding rather than providing solutions or drawing firm conclusions. Consequently, researchers reading this book with the hope of uncovering some novel theory or approach to automating an unmanned vehicle will be as disappointed as the capability planner who anticipates a catalogue of technical risks and feasibility options against his favoured list of component technologies and potential applications. Nevertheless, it is hoped that both will at least learn something of the other's world and that progress will ensue as a result. For the defence policy and decision maker, this is a "must-read" book which brings together an important technology summary with a considered analysis of future doctrinal, legal and ethical issues in unmanned and autonomous systems. For research engineers and developers of robotics, this book provides a unique perspective on the implications and consequences of our craft; connecting what we do to the deployment and use of the technology in current and future defence systems. Professor Hugh Durrant-Whyte

From an engineering standpoint, the increasing complexity of robotic systems and the increasing demand for more autonomously learning robots, has become essential. This book is largely based on the successful workshop "From motor to interaction learning in robots" held at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robot Systems. The major aim of the book is to give students interested the topics described above a chance to get started faster and researchers a helpful compandium.

By the dawn of the new millennium, robotics has undergone a major tra- formation in scope and dimensions. This expansion has been brought about bythematurityofthe?eldandtheadvancesinitsrelatedtechnologies.From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics has been rapidly expanding into the challenges of the human world. The new generation of robots is expected to safely and dependably co-habitat with humans in homes, workplaces, and communities,providingsupportinservices,entertainment,education,heal- care, manufacturing, and assistance. 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. The goal of the series of Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR) is to bring, in a timely fashion, the latest advances and developments in robotics on the basis of their signi?cance and quality. It is our hope that the wider dissemination of research developments will stimulate more exchanges and collaborations among the research community and contribute to further advancement of this rapidly growing ?eld.

One of the fundamental requirements for the success of a robot task is the capability to handle interaction between manipulator and environment. The quantity that describes the state of interaction more effectively is the contact force at the manipulator's end effector. High values of contact force are generally undesirable since they may stress both the manipulator and the manipulated object; hence the need to seek for effective force control strategies. The book provides a theoretical and experimental treatment of robot interaction control. In the framework of model-based operational space control, stiffness control and impedance control are presented as the basic strategies for indirect force control; a key feature is the coverage of six-degree-of-freedom interaction tasks and manipulator kinematic redundancy. Then, direct force control strategies are presented which are obtained from motion control schemes suitably modified by the closure of an outer force regulation feedback loop. Finally, advanced force and position control strategies are presented which include passivity-based, adaptive and output feedback control schemes. Remarkably, all control schemes are experimentally tested on a setup consisting of a seven-joint industrial robot with open control architecture and force/torque sensor. The topic of robot force control is not treated in depth in robotics textbooks, in spite of its crucial importance for practical manipulation tasks. In the few books addressing this topic, the material is often limited to single-degree-of-freedom tasks. On the other hand, several results are available in the robotics literature but no dedicated monograph exists. The book is thus aimed at filling this gap by providing a theoretical and experimental treatment of robot force control.

This book includes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 16th Annual RoboCup International Symposium, held in Mexico City, Mexico, in June 2012. The 24 revised papers presented together with nine champion team papers and one best paper award were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. The papers present current research and educational activities within the fields of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence with a special focus to robot hardware and software, perception and action, robotic cognition and learning, multi-robot systems, human-robot interaction, education and edutainment, and applications.

In recent yearswe haveseen considerableadvances in the development of - manoid robots, that is robots with an anthropomorphic design. Such robots should be capable of autonomously performing tasks for their human users in changing environments by adapting to these and to the circumstances at hand. To do so, they as well as any kind of autonomous robot need to have some way of understanding the world around them. We humans do so by our senses, both our far senses vision and hearing (smelling too) and our near senses touch and taste. Vision plays a special role in the way it simulta- ously tells us "where" and "what" in a direct way. It is therefore an accepted factthatto developautonomousrobots,humanoidornot,itisessentialto- clude competent systems for visual perception. Such systems should embody techniques from the ?eld of computer vision, in which sophisticated com- tational methods for extracting information from visual imagery have been developed over a number of decades. However, complete systems incorpor- ing such advanced techniques, while meeting the requirements of real-time processing and adaptivity to the complexity that even our everyday envir- ment displays, are scarce. The present volume takes an important step for ?lling this gap by presenting methods and a system for visual perception for a humanoid robot with speci?c applications to manipulation tasks and to how the robot can learn by imitating the human.

Walking machines have potential advantages over traditional vehicles, and they have already succeeded in carrying out many tasks that wheeled or tracked robots cannot handle. Nevertheless, their use in industry and services is currently limited in scope. Quadrupedal Locomotion: An Introduction to the Control of Four-legged Robots brings together some of the methods and techniques in this emerging field that have recently been developed in an effort to deal with the problems that currently prevent legged robots being more widely used for real applications.

Quadrupedal Locomotion: An Introduction to the Control of Four-legged Robots illustrates the appropriate algorithms and methods through a discussion of simulation and experiments that have been tested on a real machine, the SILO4 walking robot. Data from the experiments can be found on-line at http: //www.iai.csic.es/users/silo4/. This book is divided into two parts: the first part, Walking Measurements and Algorithms, introduces the historical development of quadrupeds, their advantages/disadvantages and potential uses, and the trade-off between quadrupeds and hexapods. The second part, Control Techniques, concentrates on general techniques that have been specifically applied to legged robots, including kinematic and dynamic models, soft computing techniques to increase speed, virtual sensors that help reduce the electronic burden of the machine, and software simulators to study and test certain robot properties.

As the first book to focus specifically on quadrupeds, Quadrupedal Locomotion: An Introduction to the Control of Four-legged Robots will be suitable for researchers, postgraduates and senior undergraduates in the field of robotics as well as engineers working in industry.

The monograph written by John Mullane, Ba-Ngu Vo, Martin Adams and Ba-Tuong Vo is devoted to the field of autonomous robot systems, which have been receiving a great deal of attention by the research community in the latest few years. The contents are focused on the problem of representing the environment and its uncertainty in terms of feature based maps. Random Finite Sets are adopted as the fundamental tool to represent a map, and a general framework is proposed for feature management, data association and state estimation. The approaches are tested in a number of experiments on both ground based and marine based facilities.