Featuring selected contributions from the 2nd International Conference on Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering, held in Nice, France, February 18-19, 2016, this book introduces recent advances and state-of-the-art technologies in the field of advanced intelligent manufacturing. This systematic and carefully detailed collection provides a valuable reference source for mechanical engineering researchers who want to learn about the latest developments in advanced manufacturing and automation, readers from industry seeking potential solutions for their own applications, and those involved in the robotics and mechatronics industry.

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.

This book examines discrete dynamical systems with memory-nonlinear systems that exist extensively in biological organisms and financial and economic organizations, and time-delay systems that can be discretized into the memorized, discrete dynamical systems. It book further discusses stability and bifurcations of time-delay dynamical systems that can be investigated through memorized dynamical systems as well as bifurcations of memorized nonlinear dynamical systems, discretization methods of time-delay systems, and periodic motions to chaos in nonlinear time-delay systems. The book helps readers find analytical solutions of MDS, change traditional perturbation analysis in time-delay systems, detect motion complexity and singularity in MDS; and determine stability, bifurcation, and chaos in any time-delay system.

This book provides a review of the state-of-the-art of agricultural robotics in different aspects of PA, the goals, and the gaps. The book introduces the area of Agricultural Robotics for Precision Agriculture (PA) specifically the conditions and limitations for implementing robots in this field and presents the concepts, principles, required abilities, components, characteristics and performance measures, conditions, and rules for robots in PA.

The proceedings brings together a selection of papers from the 7th International Workshop of Advanced Manufacturing and Automation (IWAMA 2017), held in Changshu Institute of Technology, Changshu, China on September 11-12, 2017. Most of the topics are focusing on novel techniques for manufacturing and automation in Industry 4.0. 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 factories.

This book brings together work on Turkish natural language and speech processing over the last 25 years, covering numerous fundamental tasks ranging from morphological processing and language modeling, to full-fledged deep parsing and machine translation, as well as computational resources developed along the way to enable most of this work. Owing to its complex morphology and free constituent order, Turkish has proved to be a fascinating language for natural language and speech processing research and applications. After an overview of the aspects of Turkish that make it challenging for natural language and speech processing tasks, this book discusses in detail the main tasks and applications of Turkish natural language and speech processing. A compendium of the work on Turkish natural language and speech processing, it is a valuable reference for new researchers considering computational work on Turkish, as well as a one-stop resource for commercial and research institutions planning to develop applications for Turkish. It also serves as a blueprint for similar work on other Turkic languages such as Azeri, Turkmen and Uzbek.

The Intelligent Systems Series encompasses theoretical studies, design methods, and real-world implementations and applications. It publishes titles in three core sub-topic areas: Intelligent Automation, Intelligent Transportation Systems, and Intelligent Computing. Titles focus on professional and academic reference works and handbooks. This volume, Advances in Artificial Transportation Systems and Simulation, covers hot topics including driver assistance systems; cooperative vehicle-highway systems; collision avoidance; pedestrian protection; image, radar and lidar signal processing; and V2V and V2I communications. The readership for the series is broad, reflecting the wide range of intelligent systems interest and application, but focuses on engineering (in particular automation, control, mechatronics, robotics, transportation, automotive, aerospace), electronics and electronic design, and computer science.

Copyright (c)2015 Zhejiang University Press, Published by Elsevier Inc. Household Service Robotics is a collection of the latest technological advances in household service robotics in five main areas: robot systems, manipulation, navigation, object recognition, and human-robot interaction. The book enables readers to understand development s and apply them to their own working areas, including: Robotic technologies for assisted living and elderly care Domestic cleaning automation Household surveillance Guiding systems for public spaces Service robotics is a highly multidisciplinary field, requiring a holistic approach. This handbook provides insights to the disciplines involved in the field as well as advanced methods and techniques that enable the scale-up of theory to actual systems. It includes coverage of functionalities such as vision systems, location control, and HCI, which are important in domestic settings.

The DARPA Robotics Challenge was a robotics competition that took place in Pomona, California USA in June 2015. The competition was the culmination of 33 months of demanding work by 23 teams and required humanoid robots to perform challenging locomotion and manipulation tasks in a mock disaster site. The challenge was conceived as a response to the Japanese Fukushima nuclear disaster of March 2011. The Fukushima disaster was seen as an ideal candidate for robotic intervention since the risk of exposure to radiation prevented human responders from accessing the site. This volume, edited by Matthew Spenko, Stephen Buerger, and Karl Iagnemma, includes commentary by the organizers, overall analysis of the results, and documentation of the technical efforts of 15 competing teams. The book provides an important record of the successes and failures involved in the DARPA Robotics Challenge and provides guidance for future needs to be addressed by policy makers, funding agencies, and the robotics research community. Many of the papers in this volume were initially published in a series of special issues of the Journal of Field Robotics. We have proudly collected versions of those papers in this STAR volume.

This book starts with a short recapitulation on basic concepts, common to any types of robots (serial, tree structure, parallel, etc.), that are also necessary for computation of the dynamic models of parallel robots. Then, as dynamics requires the use of geometry and kinematics, the general equations of geometric and kinematic models of parallel robots are given. After, it is explained that parallel robot dynamic models can be obtained by decomposing the real robot into two virtual systems: a tree-structure robot (equivalent to the robot legs for which all joints would be actuated) plus a free body corresponding to the platform. Thus, the dynamics of rigid tree-structure robots is analyzed and algorithms to obtain their dynamic models in the most compact form are given. The dynamic model of the real rigid parallel robot is obtained by closing the loops through the use of the Lagrange multipliers. The problem of the dynamic model degeneracy near singularities is treated and optimal trajectory planning for crossing singularities is proposed. Lastly, the approach is extended to flexible parallel robots and the algorithms for computing their symbolic model in the most compact form are given. All theoretical developments are validated through experiments.

This book focuses on enabling mobile robots to recognize scenes in indoor environments, in order to allow them to determine which actions are appropriate at which points in time. In concrete terms, future robots will have to solve the classification problem represented by scene recognition sufficiently well for them to act independently in human-centered environments. To achieve accurate yet versatile indoor scene recognition, the book presents a hierarchical data structure for scenes - the Implicit Shape Model trees. Further, it also provides training and recognition algorithms for these trees. In general, entire indoor scenes cannot be perceived from a single point of view. To address this problem the authors introduce Active Scene Recognition (ASR), a concept that embeds canonical scene recognition in a decision-making system that selects camera views for a mobile robot to drive to so that it can find objects not yet localized. The authors formalize the automatic selection of camera views as a Next-Best-View (NBV) problem to which they contribute an algorithmic solution, which focuses on realistic problem modeling while maintaining its computational efficiency. Lastly, the book introduces a method for predicting the poses of objects to be searched, establishing the otherwise missing link between scene recognition and NBV estimation.

This book presents selected research papers from the 2015 Chinese Intelligent Systems Conference (CISC'15), held in Yangzhou, China. The topics covered include multi-agent systems, evolutionary computation, artificial intelligence, complex systems, computation intelligence and soft computing, intelligent control, advanced control technology, robotics and applications, intelligent information processing, iterative learning control, and machine learning. Engineers and researchers from academia, industry and the government can gain valuable insights into solutions combining ideas from multiple disciplines in the field of intelligent systems.

This book presents selected peer-reviewed papers from the International Conference on Mechanical and Energy Technologies, which was held on 7-8 November 2019 at Galgotias College of Engineering and Technology, Greater Noida, India. The book reports on the latest developments in the field of mechanical and energy technology in contributions prepared by experts from academia and industry. The broad range of topics covered includes aerodynamics and fluid mechanics, artificial intelligence, nonmaterial and nonmanufacturing technologies, rapid manufacturing technologies and prototyping, remanufacturing, renewable energies technologies, metrology and computer-aided inspection, etc. Accordingly, the book offers a valuable resource for researchers in various fields, especially mechanical and industrial engineering, and energy technologies.

In addition to the contributions presented at the 2018 International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER 2018), this book features summaries of the discussions that were held during the event in Buenos Aires, Argentina. These summaries, authored by leading researchers and session organizers, offer important insights on the issues that drove the symposium debates. Readers will find cutting-edge experimental research results from a range of robotics domains, such as medical robotics, unmanned aerial vehicles, mobile robot navigation, mapping and localization, field robotics, robot learning, robotic manipulation, human-robot interaction, and design and prototyping. In this unique collection of the latest experimental robotics work, the common thread is the experimental testing and validation of new ideas and methodologies. The International Symposium on Experimental Robotics is a series of bi-annual symposia sponsored by the International Foundation of Robotics Research, whose goal is to provide a dedicated forum for experimental robotics research. In recent years, robotics has broadened its scientific scope, deepened its methodologies and expanded its applications. However, the significance of experiments remains at the heart of the discipline. The ISER gatherings are an essential venue where scientists can meet and have in-depth discussions on robotics based on this central tenet.

In this book advanced balancing methods for planar and spatial linkages, hand operated and automatic robot manipulators are presented. It is organized into three main parts and eight chapters. The main parts are the introduction to balancing, the balancing of linkages and the balancing of robot manipulators. The review of state-of-the-art literature including more than 500 references discloses particularities of shaking force/moment balancing and gravity compensation methods. Then new methods for balancing of linkages are considered. Methods provided in the second part of the book deal with the partial and complete shaking force/moment balancing of various linkages. A new field for balancing methods applications is the design of mechanical systems for fast manipulation. Special attention is given to the shaking force/moment balancing of robot manipulators. Gravity balancing methods are also discussed. The suggested balancing methods are illustrated by numerous examples.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology provides a means of communication that allows individuals with severely impaired movement to communicate with assistive devices using the electroencephalogram (EEG) or other brain signals. The practicality of a BCI has been possible due to advances in multi-disciplinary areas of research related to cognitive neuroscience, brain-imaging techniques and human-computer interfaces. However, two major challenges remain in making BCI for assistive robotics practical for day-to-day use: the inherent lower bandwidth of BCI, and how to best handle the unknown embedded noise within the raw EEG. Brain-Computer Interfacing for Assistive Robotics is a result of research focusing on these important aspects of BCI for real-time assistive robotic application. It details the fundamental issues related to non-stationary EEG signal processing (filtering) and the need of an alternative approach for the same. Additionally, the book also discusses techniques for overcoming lower bandwidth of BCIs by designing novel use-centric graphical user interfaces. A detailed investigation into both these approaches is discussed.

The demand for safety in modern industrial processes has come to involve an increasing demand for teleoperated devices in order to avoid the exposure of humans to hazardous conditions during the operation, maintenance under normal or abnormal conditions and decommissioning of equipment after its useful lifetime has terminated. An important for teleoperations has been reached in the 1990s as the first commercial nuclear power stations reach the end of their useful life. Simultaneously, progress in the work on controlled thermonuclear fusion demonstrates the importance of teleoperation in the assembly of future reactors as well as in their maintenance and decommissioning. "Teleoperation: Numerical Simulation and Experimental Validation" presents the fundamentals and the advances in simulation and experimentation in the teleoperations field, dealing with such matters as path planning, calibration, autonomy, safety, and radiation hardening. The book addresses users working in the field of engineering R&D and plant operation management. Students in schools of engineeering, too, should find the book of value, as it addresses topics of acute practical interest in an area that can only grow in importance.

This edited volume includes thoroughly collected on sensing and control for autonomous vehicles. Guidance, navigation and motion control systems for autonomous vehicles are increasingly important in land-based, marine and aerial operations. Autonomous underwater vehicles may be used for pipeline inspection, light intervention work, underwater survey and collection of oceanographic/biological data. Autonomous unmanned aerial systems can be used in a large number of applications such as inspection, monitoring, data collection, surveillance, etc. At present, vehicles operate with limited autonomy and a minimum of intelligence. There is a growing interest for cooperative and coordinated multi-vehicle systems, real-time re-planning, robust autonomous navigation systems and robust autonomous control of vehicles. Unmanned vehicles with high levels of autonomy may be used for safe and efficient collection of environmental data, for assimilation of climate and environmental models and to complement global satellite systems. The target audience primarily comprises research experts in the field of control theory, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

Systems with mechanical degrees of freedom containing unstable objects are analysed in this monograph and algorithms for their control are developed, discussed, and numerically tested. This is achieved by identifying unstable modes of motion and using all available resources to suppress them. By using this approach the region of states from which a stable regime can be reached is maximised. The systems discussed in this book are models for pendula and vehicles and find applications in mechatronics, robotics as well as in mechanical and automotive engineering.

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 Reykjavik, 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.

This book features influential scholarly research and technical contributions, professional trajectories, disciplinary shifts, personal insights, and a combination of these from a group of remarkable women scholars within precision agriculture. The authors provide a holistic and critical overview of the field of precision agriculture (both crop and livestock), highlighting breakthroughs and impactful research led by women investigators including relevant technologies, decision making strategies, practices, applications, economics, opportunities and challenges. They discuss the urgent need for reduced cost, increased productivity, more optimal use of resources, and reduced impact on our environment. The leading female researchers contributing to this book are creating new technological advances that are revolutionizing agriculture. Focuses on advances in precision agriculture led by leading women researchers, scholars, and professionals; Provides insight into women's technical contributions in precision agriculture; Takes a holistic approach to precision agriculture, addressing both land and livestock applications.

This book provides a thorough overview of cutting-edge research on electronics applications relevant to industry, the environment, and society at large. It covers a broad spectrum of application domains, from automotive to space and from health to security, while devoting special attention to the use of embedded devices and sensors for imaging, communication and control. The book is based on the 2016 ApplePies Conference, held in Rome, Italy in September 2016, which brought together researchers and stakeholders to consider the most significant current trends in the field of applied electronics and to debate visions for the future. Areas addressed by the conference included information communication technology; biotechnology and biomedical imaging; space; secure, clean and efficient energy; the environment; and smart, green and integrated transport. As electronics technology continues to develop apace, constantly meeting previously unthinkable targets, further attention needs to be directed toward the electronics applications and the development of systems that facilitate human activities. This book, written by industrial and academic professionals, represents a valuable contribution in this endeavor.

This volume contains the Proceedings of the First International Conference of IFToMM Italy (IFIT2016), held at the University of Padova, Vicenza, Italy, on December 1-2, 2016. The book contains contributions on the latest advances on Mechanism and Machine Science. The fifty-nine papers deal with such topics as biomechanical engineering, history of mechanism and machine science, linkages and mechanical controls, multi-body dynamics, reliability, robotics and mechatronics, transportation machinery, tribology, and vibrations.