The volume includes a set of selected papers extended and revised from the 2011 International Conference on Computer, Communication, Control and Automation (3CA 2011). 2011 International Conference on Computer, Communication, Control and Automation (3CA 2011) has been held in Zhuhai, China, November 19-20, 2011. This volume topics covered include signal and Image processing, speech and audio Processing, video processing and analysis, artificial intelligence, computing and intelligent systems, machine learning, sensor and neural networks, knowledge discovery and data mining, fuzzy mathematics and Applications, knowledge-based systems, hybrid systems modeling and design, risk analysis and management, system modeling and simulation. We hope that researchers, graduate students and other interested readers benefit scientifically from the proceedings and also find it stimulating in the process.

The Computational Biomechanics for Medicine titles provide an opportunity for specialists in computational biomechanics to present their latest methodologies and advancements. This volume comprises eighteen of the newest approaches and applications of computational biomechanics, from researchers in Australia, New Zealand, USA, UK, Switzerland, Scotland, France and Russia. Some of the interesting topics discussed are: tailored computational models; traumatic brain injury; soft-tissue mechanics; medical image analysis; and clinically-relevant simulations. One of the greatest challenges facing the computational engineering community is to extend the success of computational mechanics to fields outside traditional engineering, in particular to biology, the biomedical sciences, and medicine. We hope the research presented within this book series will contribute to overcoming this grand challenge.

Applied Cyber-Physical Systems presents the latest methods and technologies in the area of cyber-physical systems including medical and biological applications. Cyber-physical systems (CPS) integrate computing and communication capabilities by monitoring, and controlling the physical systems via embedded hardware and computers. This book brings together unique contributions from renowned experts on cyber-physical systems research and education with applications. It also addresses the major challenges in CPS, and then provides a resolution with various diverse applications as examples. Advanced-level students and researchers focused on computer science, engineering and biomedicine will find this to be a useful secondary text book or reference, as will professionals working in this field.

"Software Engineering for Experimental Robotics" collects contributions that describe the state of the art in software development for the Robotics domain. It reports on innovative ideas that are progressively introduced in the software development process, in order to promote the reuse of robotic software artifacts: domain engineering, components, frameworks and architectural styles. It illustrates the results of the most successful and well-known research projects which aim to develop reusable robotic software systems. Most of the chapters report on concepts and ideas discussed at the well attended ICRA2005 Workshop on "Principles and Practice of Software Development in Robotics," Barcelona, Spain, April 18 2005. The authors are recognised as leading scholars internationally, and the result is an effective blend of fundamental and innovative results on research and development in software for robotic systems, where one common factor is the integration of reusable building blocks. Besides the advancement in the field, most contributions survey the state of the art, report a number of practical applications to real systems, and discuss possible future developments.

Universal vehicular communication promises many improvements in terms of ac- dent avoidance and mitigation, better utilization of roads and resources such as time and fuel, and new opportunities for infotainment applications. However, before widespread acceptance, vehicular communication must meet challenges comparable to the trouble and disbelief that accompanied the introduction of traf c lights back then. The rst traf c light was installed in 1868 in London to signal railway, but only later, in 1912, was invented the rst red-green electric traf c light. And roughly 50 years after the rst traf c light, in 1920, the rst four-way traf c signal comparable to our today's traf c lights was introduced. The introduction of traf c signals was necessary after automobiles soon became prevalent once the rst car in history, actually a wooden motorcycle, was constructed in 1885. Soon, the scene became complicated, requiring the introduction of the "right-of-way" philosophy and later on the very rst traf c light. In the same way the traf c light was a necessary mean to regulate the beginning of the automotive life and to protect drivers, passengers, as well as pedestrians and other inhabitants of the road infrastructure, vehicular communication is necessary to accommodate the further growth of traf c volume and to signi cantly reduce the number of accidents.

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.

This book reports on findings at the intersection between two related fields, namely coastal hydrography and marine robotics. On one side, it shows how the exploration of the ocean can be performed by autonomous underwater vehicles; on the other side, it shows how some methods from hydrography can be implemented in the localization and navigation of such vehicles, e.g. for target identification or path finding. Partially based on contributions presented at the conference Quantitative Monitoring of Underwater Environment, MOQESM, held on October 11-12, 2016, Brest, France, this book includes carefully revised and extended chapters presented at the conference, together with original papers not related to the event. All in all, it provides readers with a snapshot of current methods for sonar track registration, multi-vehicles control, collective exploration of underwater environments, optimization of propulsion systems, among others. More than that, the book is aimed as source of inspiration and tool to promote further discussions and collaboration between hydrographers, robotic specialists and other related communities.

Making Robots Smarter is a book about learning robots. It treats this topic based on the idea that the integration of sensing and action is the central issue. In the first part of the book, aspects of learning in execution and control are discussed. Methods for the automatic synthesis of controllers, for active sensing, for learning to enhance assembly, and for learning sensor-based navigation are presented. Since robots are not isolated but should serve us, the second part of the book discusses learning for human-robot interaction. Methods of learning understandable concepts for assembly, monitoring, and navigation are described as well as optimizing the implementation of such understandable concepts for a robot's real-time performance. In terms of the study of embodied intelligence, Making Robots Smarter asks how skills are acquired and where capabilities of execution and control come from. Can they be learned from examples or experience? What is the role of communication in the learning procedure? Whether we name it one way or the other, the methodological challenge is that of integrating learning capabilities into robots.

Vision-based mobile robot guidance has proved difficult for classical machine vision methods because of the diversity and real-time constraints inherent in the task. This book describes a connectionist system called ALVINN (Autonomous Land Vehicle In a Neural Network) that overcomes these difficulties. ALVINN learns to guide mobile robots using the back-propagation training algorithm. Because of its ability to learn from example, ALVINN can adapt to new situations and therefore cope with the diversity of the autonomous navigation task. But real world problems like vision-based mobile robot guidance present a different set of challenges for the connectionist paradigm. Among them are: how to develop a general representation from a limited amount of real training data; how to understand the internal representations developed by artificial neural networks; how to estimate the reliability of individual networks; how to combine multiple networks trained for different situations into a single system; how to combine connectionist perception with symbolic reasoning. Neural Network Perception for Mobile Robot Guidance presents novel solutions to each of these problems. Using these techniques, the ALVINN system can learn to control an autonomous van in under 5 minutes by watching a person drive. Once trained, individual ALVINN networks can drive in a variety of circumstances, including single-lane paved and unpaved roads, and multi-lane lined and unlined roads, at speeds of up to 55 miles per hour. The techniques also are shown to generalize to the task of controlling the precise foot placement of a walking robot.

The present book includes a set of selected papers from the seventh "International Conference on Informatics in Control Automation and Robotics" (ICINCO 2010), held in Madeira, Portugal, from 15 to 18 June 2010. The conference was organized in three simultaneous tracks: "Intelligent Control Systems and Optimization", "Robotics and Automation" and "Signal Processing, Systems Modeling and Control". The book is based on the same structure. ICINCO received 320 paper submissions, not including those of workshops or special sessions, from 57 countries, in all continents. After a double blind paper review performed by the Program Committee only 27 submissions were accepted as full papers and thus selected for oral presentation, leading to a full paper acceptance ratio of 8%. Additional papers were accepted as short papers and posters. 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 2010. Commitment to high quality standards is a major concern of ICINCO that will be maintained in the next editions of this conference, including not only the stringent paper acceptance ratios but also the quality of the program committee, keynote lectures, workshops and logistics.

Here is a comprehensive presentation of methodology for the design and synthesis of an intelligent complex robotic system, connecting formal tools from discrete system theory, artificial intelligence, neural network, and fuzzy logic. The necessary methods for solving real time action planning, coordination and control problems are described. A notable chapter presents a new approach to intelligent robotic agent control acting in a realworld environment based on a lifelong learning approach combining cognitive and reactive capabilities. Another key feature is the homogeneous description of all solutions and methods based on system theory formalism.

This volume describes new frontiers in medical and service robotics in the light of recent developments in technology to advance robot design and implementation. In particular, the work looks at advances in design, development and implementation of contemporary surgical, rehabilitation and biorobots. Surgical robots allow surgeons greater access to areas under operation using more precise and less invasive methods. Rehabilitation robots facilitate and support the lives of the infirm, elderly people, or those with dysfunction of body parts affecting movement. These robots are also used for rehabilitation and related procedures, such as training and therapy. Biorobots are designed to imitate the cognition of humans and animals. The need to substitute humans working on delicate, tiresome and monotonous tasks, or working with potentially health-damaging toxic materials, requires intelligent, high-performance service robots with the ability to cooperate, advanced communication and sophisticated perception and cognitive capabilities. Progress in this field is fast and results need to be disseminated to stimulate both practical applications and further research. Thus, these papers are a valuable addition to existing literature.

The human hand and its dexterity in grasping and manipulating objects are some of the hallmarks of the human species. For years, anatomic and biomechanical studies have deepened the understanding of the human hand's functioning and, in parallel, the robotics community has been working on the design of robotic hands capable of manipulating objects with a performance similar to that of the human hand. However, although many researchers have partially studied various aspects, to date there has been no comprehensive characterization of the human hand's function for grasping and manipulation of everyday life objects. This monograph explores the hypothesis that the confluence of both scientific fields, the biomechanical study of the human hand and the analysis of robotic manipulation of objects, would greatly benefit and advance both disciplines through simulation. Therefore, in this book, the current knowledge of robotics and biomechanics guides the design and implementation of a simulation framework focused on manipulation interactions that allows the study of the grasp through simulation. As a result, a valuable framework for the study of the grasp, with relevant applications in several fields such as robotics, biomechanics, ergonomics, rehabilitation and medicine, has been made available to these communities.

Nowadays, multiple attention have been paid on a robot working in the human living environment, such as in the field of medical, welfare, entertainment and so on. Various types of researches are being conducted actively in a variety of fields such as artificial intelligence, cognitive engineering, sensor- technology, interfaces and motion control. In the future, it is expected to realize super high functional human-like robot by integrating technologies in various fields including these types of researches. The book represents new developments and advances in the field of bio-inspired robotics research introducing the state of the art, the idea of multi-locomotion robotic system to implement the diversity of animal motion. It covers theoretical and computational aspects of Passive Dynamic Autonomous Control (PDAC), robot motion control, multi legged walking and climbing as well as brachiation focusing concrete robot systems, components and applications. In addition, gorilla type robot systems are described as hardware of Multi-Locomotion Robotic system. It is useful for students and researchers in the field of robotics in general, bio-inspired robots, multi-modal locomotion, legged walking, motion control, and humanoid robots. Furthermore, it is also of interest for lecturers and engineers in practice building systems cooperating with humans.

This book presents the concept of cognition in a clear, lucid and highly comprehensive style. It provides an in-depth analysis of mathematical models and algorithms, and demonstrates their application with real life experiments.

Digital Twins for Healthcare: Design, Challenges and Solutions establishes the state-of-art in the specification, design, creation, deployment and exploitation of digital twins' technologies for healthcare and wellbeing. A digital twin is a digital replication of a living or non-living physical entity. When data is transmitted seamlessly, it bridges the physical and virtual worlds, thus allowing the virtual entity to exist simultaneously with the physical entity. A digital twin facilitates the means to understand, monitor, and optimize the functions of the physical entity and provide continuous feedback. It can be used to improve citizens' quality of life and wellbeing in smart cities and the virtualization of industrial processes.

This book presents the most recent advances in the research and applications of reconfigurable mechanisms and robots. It collects 93 independently reviewed papers presented at the Third ASME/IFToMM International Conference on Reconfigurable Mechanisms and Robots (ReMAR 2015) held in Beijing, China, 20-22 July 2015. The conference papers are organized into seven parts to cover the reconfiguration theory, topology, kinematics and design of reconfigurable mechanisms including reconfigurable parallel mechanisms. The most recent results on reconfigurable robots are presented including their analysis, design, simulation and control. Bio-inspired mechanisms are also explored in the challenging fields of rehabilitation and minimally invasive surgery. This book further addresses deployable mechanisms and origami-inspired mechanisms and showcases a wide range of successful applications of reconfigurable mechanisms and robots. Advances in Reconfigurable Mechanisms and Robots II should be of interest for researchers, engineers and postgraduate students in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science and mathematics.

This volume surveys three decades of modern robot control theory and describes how the work of Suguru Arimoto shaped its development. Twelve survey articles written by experts associated with Suguru Arimoto at various stages in his career treat the subject comprehensively. This book provides an important reference for graduate students and researchers, as well as for mathematicians, engineers and scientists whose work involves robot control theory.

In 1960, R. E. Kalman published his celebrated paper on recursive min imum variance estimation in dynamical systems [14]. This paper, which introduced an algorithm that has since been known as the discrete Kalman filter, produced a virtual revolution in the field of systems engineering. Today, Kalman filters are used in such diverse areas as navigation, guid ance, oil drilling, water and air quality, and geodetic surveys. In addition, Kalman's work led to a multitude of books and papers on minimum vari ance estimation in dynamical systems, including one by Kalman and Bucy on continuous time systems [15]. Most of this work was done outside of the mathematics and statistics communities and, in the spirit of true academic parochialism, was, with a few notable exceptions, ignored by them. This text is my effort toward closing that chasm. For mathematics students, the Kalman filtering theorem is a beautiful illustration of functional analysis in action; Hilbert spaces being used to solve an extremely important problem in applied mathematics. For statistics students, the Kalman filter is a vivid example of Bayesian statistics in action. The present text grew out of a series of graduate courses given by me in the past decade. Most of these courses were given at the University of Mas sachusetts at Amherst.

This book reviews the fundamentals of screw theory concerned with velocity analysis of rigid-bodies, confirmed with detailed and explicit proofs. The author additionally investigates acceleration, jerk, and hyper-jerk analyses of rigid-bodies following the trend of the velocity analysis. With the material provided in this book, readers can extend the theory of screws into the kinematics of optional order of rigid-bodies. Illustrative examples and exercises to reinforce learning are provided. Of particular note, the kinematics of emblematic parallel manipulators, such as the Delta robot as well as the original Gough and Stewart platforms are revisited applying, in addition to the theory of screws, new methods devoted to simplify the corresponding forward-displacement analysis, a challenging task for most parallel manipulators.