This book gathers extended versions of the best papers presented at the 8th IEEE conference on Intelligent Systems, held in Sofia, Bulgaria on September 4-6, 2016, which are mainly related to theoretical research in the area of intelligent systems. The main focus is on novel developments in fuzzy and intuitionistic fuzzy sets, the mathematical modelling tool of generalized nets and the newly defined method of intercriteria analysis. The papers reflect a broad and diverse team of authors, including many young researchers from Australia, Bulgaria, China, the Czech Republic, Iran, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, South Korea and the UK.

The term "haptics" refers to the science of sensing and manipulation through touch. Multiple disciplines such as biomechanics, psychophysics, robotics, neuroscience, and software engineering converge to support haptics, and generally, haptic research is done by three communities: the robotics community, the human computer interface community, and the virtual reality community.

This book is different from any other book that has looked at haptics. The authors treat haptics as a new medium rather than just a domain within one of the above areas. They describe human haptic perception and interfaces and present fundamentals in haptic rendering and modeling in virtual environments. Diverse software architectures for standalone and networked haptic systems are explained, and the authors demonstrate the vast application spectrum of this emerging technology along with its accompanying trends. The primary objective is to provide a comprehensive overview and a practical understanding of haptic technologies. An appreciation of the close relationship between the wide range of disciplines that constitute a haptic system is a key principle towards being able to build successful collaborative haptic environments.

Structured as a reference to allow for fast accommodation of the issues concerned, this book is intended for researchers interested in studying touch and force feedback for use in technological multimedia systems in computer science, electrical engineering, or other related disciplines. With its novel approach, it paves the way for exploring research trends and challenges in such fields as interpersonal communication, games, or military applications.

This book provides readers with extensive information on path planning optimization for both single and multiple Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs), and discusses practical issues involved in advanced industrial applications of AGVs. After discussing previously published research in the field and highlighting the current gaps, it introduces new models developed by the authors with the goal of reducing costs and increasing productivity and effectiveness in the manufacturing industry. The new models address the increasing complexity of manufacturing networks, due for example to the adoption of flexible manufacturing systems that involve automated material handling systems, robots, numerically controlled machine tools, and automated inspection stations, while also considering the uncertainty and stochastic nature of automated equipment such as AGVs. The book discusses and provides solutions to important issues concerning the use of AGVs in the manufacturing industry, including material flow optimization with AGVs, programming manufacturing systems equipped with AGVs, reliability models, the reliability of AGVs, routing under uncertainty, and risks involved in AGV-based transportation. The clear style and straightforward descriptions of problems and their solutions make the book an excellent resource for graduate students. Moreover, thanks to its practice-oriented approach, the novelty of the findings and the contemporary topic it reports on, the book offers new stimulus for researchers and practitioners in the broad field of production engineering.

This book presents recent research in the field of interaction between computational intelligence and mathematics. In the current technological age, we face the challenges of tackling very complex problems - in the usual sense, but also in the mathematical and theoretical computer science sense. However, even the most up-to-date results in mathematics, are unable to provide exact solutions of such problems, and no further technical advances will ever make it possible to find general and exact solutions. Constantly developing technologies (including social technologies) necessitate handling very complex problems. This has led to a search for acceptably "good" or precise solutions, which can be achieved by the combination of traditional mathematical techniques and computational intelligence tools, in order to solve the various problems emerging in many different areas to a satisfactory degree. Important funding programs, such as the European Commission's current framework programme for research and innovation - Horizon 2020 - are devoted to the development of new instruments to deal with the current challenges. Without doubt, research topics associated with the interactions between computational intelligence and traditional mathematics play a key role. Presenting contributions from engineers, scientists and mathematicians, this book offers a series of novel solutions for meaningful and real-world problems that connect those research areas.

Except from the Foreword
The stated aim of the book series "Capturing Intelligence" is to publish books on research from all disciplines dealing with and affecting the issue of understanding and reproducing intelligence artificial systems. Of course, much of the work done in the past decades in this area has been of a highly technical nature, varying from hardware design for robots, software design for intelligent agents, and formal logic for reasoning.
It is therefore very refreshing to see Information Flow and Knowledge Sharing. This is a courageous book indeed. It is not afraid to tackle the Big Issues: notions such as information, knowledge, information system, information flow, collaborative problem solving, and ontological reasoning. All of these notions are crucial to our understanding of intelligence and our building of intelligent artificial systems, but all too often, these Big Issues are hidden behind the curtains while the technical topics take center stage.
AI has a rich history of philosophical books that have chosen a non-standard structure and narrative. It is nice to see that the authors have succeeded into combining a non-standard approach to deep questions with a non-standard format, resulting in a highly interesting volume.
"Frank van Harmelen, Series Editor"
Excerpt from the Introduction
Our interest is to promote, through a better and deeper understanding of the notions of information and knowledge, a better and deeper critical understanding of information technology as situated in the full range of human activities, assuming as a principle that this range of activities cannot be properly appreciated when it is reduced to the simplifiedmeans-end schema proposed by Technology. We invite the reader to build his/her own points of view about these notions, considering our propositions as a starting point for a critical analysis and discussion of these points. With that, we believe we are contributing to a better understanding of the impact of technology - and particularly of Information Technology - in everyday life.
"Flavio Soares Correa da Silva, Jaume Agusti-Cullell"
*Bridges the gap between the technological and philosophical aspects of information technology
*Gives both professionals and academics a philosophical foundation of IT so they can better understand their own discliplines
*Sheds light on a part of IT which is often overshadowed by its technical counterparts

It is man's ongoing hope that a machine could somehow adapt to its environment by reorganizing itself. This is what the notion of self-organizing robots is based on. The theme of this book is to examine the feasibility of creating such robots within the limitations of current mechanical engineering. The topics comprise the following aspects of such a pursuit: the philosophy of design of self-organizing mechanical systems; self-organization in biological systems; the history of self-organizing mechanical systems; a case study of a self-assembling/self-repairing system as an autonomous distributed system; a self-organizing robot that can create its own shape and robotic motion; implementation and instrumentation of self-organizing robots; and the future of self-organizing robots. All topics are illustrated with many up-to-date examples, including those from the authors' own work. The book does not require advanced knowledge of mathematics to be understood, and will be of great benefit to students in the robotics discipline, including in the areas of mechanics, control, electronics, and computer science. It is also an important source for researchers who wish to investigate the field of robotics or who have an interest in the application of self-organizing phenomena.

Man is the best thing in the World. Nature does nothing uselessly. Aristotle There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more. John Burroughs The basic purpose of development is to enlarge people's choices. The objective of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives. Mahbub ul Hag Founder of the Human Development Report Theaimofthisbookis toprovidea compiledset ofconcepts,principles,methods and issues used for studying, designing and operating human-minding and natu- minding automation and industrial systems. The depth of presentation is suf?cient for the reader to understand the problems involved and the solution approaches, and appreciate the need of human-automation cooperative interaction, and the - portance of the efforts required for environment and ecosystem protection during any technological and development process in the society. Humans and technology are living and have to live together in a sustainable society and nature. Humans must not be viewed as components of automation and technology in the same way as machines. Automation and technology must incorporate the humans' needs and preferences, and radiate "beauty" in all ways, namely functionally, technically and humanistically. In overall, automation and technology should create comfort and give pleasure.

During the last decade, many researchers have dedicated their efforts to constructing revolutionary machines and to providing them with forms of artificial intelligence to perform some of the most hazardous, risky or monotonous tasks historically assigned to human beings. Among those machines, mobile robots are undoubtedly at the cutting edge of current research directions. A rough classification of mobile robots can be considered: on the one hand, mobile robots oriented to human-made indoor environments; on the other hand, mobile robots oriented to unstructured outdoor environments, which could include flying oriented robots, space-oriented robots and underwater robots. The most common motion mechanism for surface mobile robots is the wheel-based mechanism, adapted both to flat surfaces, found in human-made environments, and to rough terrain, found in outdoor environments. However, some researchers have reported successful developments with leg-based mobile robots capable of climbing up stairs, although they require further investigation. The research work presented here focuses on wheel-based mobile robots that navigate in human-made indoor environments. The main problems described throughout this book are: Representation and integration of uncertain geometric information by means of the Symmetries and Perturbations Model (SPmodel). This model combines the use of probability theory to represent the imprecision in the location of a geometric element, and the theory of symmetries to represent the partiality due to characteristics of each type of geometric element. A solution to the first location problem, that is, the computation of an estimation for the mobile robot location when the vehicle is completely lost in the environment. The problem is formulated as a search in an interpretation tree using efficient matching algorithms and geometric constraints to reduce the size of the solution space. The book proposes a new probabilistic framework adapted to the problem of simultaneous localization and map building for mobile robots: the Symmetries and Perturbations Map (SPmap). This framework has been experimentally validated by a complete experiment which profited from ground-truth to accurately validate the precision and the appropriateness of the approach. The book emphasizes the generality of the solutions proposed to the different problems and their independence with respect to the exteroceptive sensors mounted on the mobile robot. Theoretical results are complemented by real experiments, where the use of multisensor-based approaches is highlighted.

Electroactive polymers (EAPs) respond to electrical stimulation with large deformations. They are dynamic actuators which have attracted attention from an interdisciplinary audience of engineers and scientists. An enabling EAP technology is emerging which attempts to imitate the properties of natural muscle and which, as a result, can perform a unique function in a variety of biologically-inspired robotics applications.

Electroactive Polymers for Robotics Applications covers the fundamental properties, modelling and demonstration of EAPs in robotic applications, focusing particularly on artificial muscles and sensors. Ionic Polymera "Metal Composite Actuators and Dielectric Elastomers are discussed within the book with chapters on their properties and their uses in robotics applications.

With its concentration on devices based on EAPs and their uses, Electroactive Polymers for Robotics Applications will be of interest to researchers working within this field as well as to postgraduate students studying robotics or smart materials and structures. Practitioners working in the mechanical, electrical and materials industries will also find this book of value.

DARS is now a well-established conference that gathers every two years the main researchers in Distributed Robotics systems. Even if the field is growing, it has been maintained a one-track conference in order to enforce effective exchanges between the main researchers in the field. It now a well-established tradition to publish the main contributions as a book from Springer. There are already 5 books entitled "Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems" 1 to 5.

Recently, there has been considerable research interest in neural network control of robots, and satisfactory results have been obtained in solving some of the special issues associated with the problems of robot control in an "on-and-off" fashion. This book is dedicated to issues on adaptive control of robots based on neural networks. The text has been carefully tailored to (i) give a comprehensive study of robot dynamics, (ii) present structured network models for robots, and (iii) provide systematic approaches for neural network based adaptive controller design for rigid robots, flexible joint robots, and robots in constraint motion. Rigorous proof of the stability properties of adaptive neural network controllers is provided. Simulation examples are also presented to verify the effectiveness of the controllers, and practical implementation issues associated with the controllers are also discussed.

The new technological advances opened widely the application field of robots. Robots are moving from the classical application scenario with structured industrial environments and tedious repetitive tasks to new application environments that require more interaction with the humans. It is in this context that the concept of Wearable Robots (WRs) has emerged. One of the most exciting and challenging aspects in the design of biomechatronics wearable robots is that the human takes a place in the design, this fact imposes several restrictions and requirements in the design of this sort of devices. The key distinctive aspect in wearable robots is their intrinsic dual cognitive and physical interaction with humans. The key role of a robot in a physical human robot interaction (pHRI) is the generation of supplementary forces to empower and overcome human physical limits. The crucial role of a cognitive human robot interaction (cHRI) is to make the human aware of the possibilities of the robot while allowing them to maintain control of the robot at all times. This book gives a general overview of the robotics exoskeletons and introduces the reader to this robotic field. Moreover, it describes the development of an upper limb exoskeleton for tremor suppression in order to illustrate the influence of a specific application in the designs decisions."

This book is the fourth volume of the sub series of the Lecture Notes in Mobility dedicated to Road Vehicle Automation. lts chapters have been written by researchers, engineers and analysts from all around the globe. Topics covered include public sector activities, human factors and challenges, ethical, legal, energy and technology perspectives, vehicle systems development, as well as transportation infrastructure and planning. The book is based on the Automated Vehicles Symposium which took place in San Francisco, California (USA) in July 2016.

Distributed robotics is a rapidly growing and maturing interdisciplinary research area lying at the intersection of computer science, network science, control theory, and electrical and mechanical engineering. The goal of the Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS) is to exchange and stimulate research ideas to realize advanced distributed robotic systems. This volume of proceedings includes 31 original contributions presented at the 2012 International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS 2012) held in November 2012 at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD USA. The selected papers in this volume are authored by leading researchers from Asia, Europa, and the Americas, thereby providing a broad coverage and perspective of the state-of-the-art technologies, algorithms, system architectures, and applications in distributed robotic systems. The book is organized into five parts, representative of critical long-term and emerging research thrusts in the multi-robot community: Coordination for Perception, Coverage, and Tracking; Task Allocation and Coordination Strategies; Modular Robots and Novel Mechanisms and Sensors; Formation Control and Planning for Robot Teams; and Learning, Adaptation, and Cognition for Robot Teams.

Legged robots are a promising locomotion system, capable of performing tasks that conventional vehicles cannot. Even more exciting is the fact that this is a rapidly developing field of study for researchers from a variety of disciplines. However, only a few books have been published on the subject of multi-legged robots. The main objective of this book is to describe some of the major control issues concerning walking robots that the authors have faced over the past 10 years. A second objective is to focus especially on very large hydraulically driven hexapod robot locomotion weighing more than 2,000 kg, making this the first specialized book on this topic. The 10 chapters of the book touch on diverse relevant topics such as design aspects, implementation issues, modeling for control, navigation and control, force and impedance control-based walking, fully autonomous walking, walking and working tasks of hexapod robots, and the future of walking robots. The construction machines of the future will very likely resemble hydraulically driven hexapod robots like the ones described in this book - no longer science fiction but now a reality.

The design of nonlinear controllers for mechanical systems has been an ex tremely active area of research in the last two decades. From a theoretical point of view, this attention can be attributed to their interesting dynamic behavior, which makes them suitable benchmarks for nonlinear control the oreticians. On the other hand, recent technological advances have produced many real-world engineering applications that require the automatic con trol of mechanical systems. the mechanism for de Often, Lyapunov-based techniques are utilized as veloping different nonlinear control structures for mechanical systems. The allure of the Lyapunov-based framework for mechanical system control de sign can most likely be assigned to the fact that Lyapunov function candi dates can often be crafted from physical insight into the mechanics of the system. That is, despite the nonlinearities, couplings, and/or the flexible effects associated with the system, Lyapunov-based techniques can often be used to analyze the stability of the closed-loop system by using an energy like function as the Lyapunov function candidate. In practice, the design procedure often tends to be an iterative process that results in the death of many trees. That is, the controller and energy-like function are often constructed in concert to foster an advantageous stability property and/or robustness property. Fortunately, over the last 15 years, many system the ory and control researchers have labored in this area to produce various design tools that can be applied in a variety of situations."

* Provides an elegant introduction to the geometric concepts that are important to applications in robotics

* Includes significant state-of-the art material that reflects important advances, connecting robotics back to mathematical fundamentals in group theory and geometry

* An invaluable reference that serves a wide audience of grad students and researchers in mechanical engineering, computer science, and applied mathematics

Selected contributions to the Workshop WAFR 2002, held December 15-17, 2002, Nice, France. This fifth biannual Workshop on Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics focuses on algorithmic issues related to robotics and automation. The design and analysis of robot algorithms raises fundamental questions in computer science, computational geometry, mechanical modeling, operations research, control theory, and associated fields. The highly selective program highlights significant new results such as algorithmic models and complexity bounds. The validation of algorithms, design concepts, or techniques is the common thread running through this focused collection.

This book introduces non-identifier-based adaptive control (with and without internal model) and its application to the current, speed and position control of mechatronic systems such as electrical synchronous machines, wind turbine systems, industrial servo systems, and rigid-link, revolute-joint robots. In mechatronics, there is often only rough knowledge of the system. Due to parameter uncertainties, nonlinearities and unknown disturbances, model-based control strategies can reach their performance or stability limits without iterative controller design and performance evaluation, or system identification and parameter estimation. The non-identifier-based adaptive control presented is an alternative that neither identifies the system nor estimates its parameters but ensures stability. The adaptive controllers are easy to implement, compensate for disturbances and are inherently robust to parameter uncertainties and nonlinearities. For controller implementation only structural system knowledge (like relative degree, input-to-state stable zero dynamics and known sign of the high-frequency gain) is required. Moreover, the presented controllers guarantee reference tracking with prescribed asymptotic or transient accuracy, i.e. the tracking error eventually tends to or for all time evolves within an a priori specified region. The book presents the theory, modeling and application in a general but detailed and self-contained manner, making it easy to read and understand, particularly for newcomers to the topics covered

Semantic Models in IoT and eHealth Applications explores the key role of semantic web modeling in eHealth technologies, including remote monitoring, mobile health, cloud data and biomedical ontologies. The book explores different challenges and issues through the lens of various case studies of healthcare systems currently adopting these technologies. Chapters introduce the concepts of semantic interoperability within a healthcare model setting and explore how semantic representation is key to classifying, analyzing and understanding the massive amounts of biomedical data being generated by connected medical devices. Continuous health monitoring is a strong solution which can provide eHealth services to a community through the use of IoT-based devices that collect sensor data for efficient health diagnosis, monitoring and treatment. All of this collected data needs to be represented in the form of ontologies which are considered the cornerstone of the Semantic Web for knowledge sharing, information integration and information extraction.

The international conference on Automation and Robotics-ICAR2011 is held during December 12-13, 2011 in Dubai, UAE. The proceedings of ICAR2011 have been published by Springer Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, which include 163 excellent papers selected from more than 400 submitted papers.

The conference is intended to bring together the researchers and engineers/technologists working in different aspects of intelligent control systems and optimization, robotics and automation, signal processing, sensors, systems modeling and control, industrial engineering, production and management.

This part of proceedings includes 81 papers contributed by many researchers in relevant topic areas covered at ICAR2011 from various countries such as France, Japan, USA, Korea and China etc.

Many papers introduced their advanced research work recently; some of them gave a new solution to problems in the field, with powerful evidence and detail demonstration. Others stated the application of their designed and realized systems. The session topic of this proceeding is intelligent control and robotics and automation, which includes papers about Distributed Control Systems, Intelligent Fault Detection and Identification, Machine Learning in Control, Neural Networks based Control Systems, Fuzzy Control, Genetic Algorithms, Robot Design, Human-robots Interfaces, Network Robotics, and Autonomous Systems, Industrial Networks and Automation, Modeling, Simulation and Architectures, Vision, Recognition and Reconstruction, Virtual Reality, Image Processing, and so on.

All of papers here involved the authors' numerous time and energy, will be proved valuable in their research field. Sincere thanks to the committee and all the authors, moreover anonymous reviewers from many fields and organizations. That is a power for all of us to go on research work for the world."

In March 2002, the Naval Research Laboratory brought together leading researchers and government sponsors for a three-day workshop in Washington, D.C. on Multi-Robot Systems. The workshop began with presentations by various government program managers describing application areas and programs with an interest in multi robot systems. Government representatives were on hand from the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force, the Army Research Lab, the National Aeronau tics and Space Administration, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Top researchers then presented their current activities in the areas of multi robot systems and human-robot interaction. The first two days of the workshop of1ocalizatio . concentrated on multi-robot control issues, including the topics mapping, and navigation; distributed surveillance; manipulation; coordination and formations; and sensors and hardware. The third day was focused on hu man interactions with multi-robot teams. All presentations were given in a single-track workshop format. This proceedings documents the work presented by these researchers at the workshop. The invited presentations were followed by panel discussions, in which all participants interacted to highlight the challenges of this field and to develop possible solutions. In addition to the invited research talks, students were given an opportunity to present their work at poster sessions."

Sight and touch are two elementary, but highly complementary senses - for humans as well as for robots. This monograph develops an integrated vision/force control approach for robotics, combining the advantages of both types of sensors while overcoming their individual drawbacks. It shows how integrated vision/force control improves the task quality in the sense of increased accuracy and execution velocity and widens the range of feasible tasks. The unique feature of this work lies in its comprehensive treatment of the problem from the theoretical development of the various schemes down to the real-time implementation of interaction control algorithms on an industrial robot. The presented approach and its potential impact on the performance of the next generation of robots is starting to be recognized by major manufacturers worldwide.

This book focuses on the topology theory of mechanisms developed by the authors and provides a systematic method for the topology design of robot mechanisms. The main original theoretical contributions of this book include: A. Three basic concepts * The "geometrical constraint type of axes" is introduced as the third element of the topological structure of a mechanism. When it is combined with the other two elements, the kinematic pair and the connection of links, the symbolic expression of the topological structure is independent of the motion positions (except for the singularity positions) and the fixed coordinate system (Chapter 2). * The position and orientation characteristic (POC) set is used to describe the POC of the relative motion between any two links. The POC set, derived from the unit vector set of the velocity of a link, is only depend on the topological structure of a mechanism. Therefore, it is also independent of the motion positions and the fixed coordinate system (Chapter 3). * The single open chain (SOC) unit is the base unit of the topological structure used to develop the four basic equations of the mechanism topology (Chapters 2, 4-6). B. The mechanism composition principle based on the SOC units This book proposes a mechanism composition principle, based on the SOC units, to establish a systematic theory for the unified modeling of the topology, kinematics, and dynamics of mechanisms based on the SOC units (Chapter 7). C. Four basic equations* The POC equation of serial mechanisms with 10 symbolic operation rules (Chapter 4). * The POC equation of parallel mechanisms with 14 symbolic operation rules (Chapter 5). * The general DOF formula for spatial mechanisms (Chapter 6).* The coupling degree formula for the Assur kinematic chain (Chapter 7). D. One systematic method for the topology design of robot mechanisms (Chapters 8-10) Based on the three basic concepts and the four basic equations addressed above, this book puts forward a systematic method for the topology design of parallel mechanisms, which is fundamentally different from all existing methods. Its main characteristics are as follows:* The design process includes two stages: the first is structure synthesis, which derives many structure types; the second involves the performance analysis, classification and optimization of structure types derived from the first stage. * The design operation is independent of the motion positions and the fixed coordinate system. Therefore, the proposed method is essentially a geometrical method, which ensures the full-cycle DOF and the generality of geometric conditions of mechanism existence. * Each individual design step follows an explicit formula or the guidelines for design criteria, making the operation simple, feasible and reproducible. In addition, the topology design of the SCARA PMs is studied in detail to demonstrate the proposed method (Chapter 10).