This monograph focuses on how to achieve more robot autonomy by means of reliable processing skills. "Nonlinear Kalman Filtering for Force-Controlled Robot Tasks " discusses the latest developments in the areas of contact modeling, nonlinear parameter estimation and task plan optimization for improved estimation accuracy. Kalman filtering techniques are applied to identify the contact state based on force sensing between a grasped object and the environment. The potential of this work is to be found not only for industrial robot operation in space, sub-sea or nuclear scenarios, but also for service robots operating in unstructured environments co-habited by humans where autonomous compliant tasks require active sensing.

Distributed manipulation effects motion on objects through a large number of points of contact. The primary benefit of distributed manipulators is that many small inexpensive mechanisms can move and transport large heavy objects. In fact, each individual component is simple, but their combined effect is quite powerful. Furthermore, distributed manipulators are fault-tolerant because if one component breaks, the other components can compensate for the failure and the whole system can still perform its task. Finally, distributed manipulators can perform a variety of tasks in parallel. Distributed manipulation can be performed by many types of mechanisms at different scales. Due to the recent advances of MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical system) technology, it has become feasible to quickly manufacture distributed micro-manipulators at low cost. One such system is an actuator array where hundreds of micro-scaled actuators transport and manipulate small objects that rest on them. Macroscopic versions of the actuator array have also been developed and analyzed. Another form of distributed manipulation is derived from a vibrating plate, and teams of mobile robots have been used to herd large objects into desired locations. There are many fundamental issues involved in distributed manipulation. Since a distributed manipulator has many actuators, distributed control strategies must be considered to effectively manipulate objects. A basic understanding of contact analysis between the actuators and object must also be considered. When each actuator in the array has a sensor, distributed sensing presents some basic research challenges. Distributed computation and communication are key issues to enable the successful deployment of distributed manipulators into use. Finally, the trade-off in centralized and de-centralized approaches in all of these algorithms must be investigated.

The objective of this dissertation is to advance the state-of-the-art in the kinematic modeling, identification, and control of robotic manipulators with rigid links in an effort to improve robot kinematic performance. The positioning accuracy of commercially-available industrial robotic manipulators depends upon a kinematic model which describes the robot geometry in a parametric form. Manufacturing error in the machining and assembly of manipulators lead to discrepancies between the design parameters and the physical structure. Improving the kinematic perfor mance thus requires the identification of the actual kinematic parameters of each individual robot. The identified kinematic parameters are referred to as the arm signature. Existing robot kinematic models, such as the Denavit-Hartenberg model, are not directly applicable to kinematic parameter identification. In this dissertation we introduce a new kinematic model, called the 5-Model, which is applicable to kinematic parameter identification, and use it as the foundation for our development of a general technique for identifying the kinematic parameters of any robot with rigid links."

- Written by world-leading subject specialist in both sport management and artificial intelligence - Includes interviews with elite sports managers and coaches - Examines the competitive advantages offered by AI to a wide-range of areas including Recruitment, Performance & Tactics, Health & Fitness, Pedagogy, Broadcasting, eSports, Gambling, and Stadium Design

This book provides a wide scope of contributions related to optoelectronic device application in a variety of robotic systems for diverse purposes. The contributions are focused on optoelectronic sensors and analyzing systems, 3D and 2D machine vision technologies, robot navigation, pose estimations, robot operation in cyclic procedures, control schemes, motion controllers, and intelligent algorithms and vision systems. Applications of these technologies are outlined for unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous and mobile robots, industrial inspection applications, cultural heritage documentation, and structural health monitoring. Also discussed are recent advanced research in measurement and others areas where 3D and 2D machine vision and machine control play an important role. Surveys and reviews about optoelectronic and vision-based applications are also included. These topics are of interest to readers from a diverse group including those working in optoelectronics, and electrical, electronic and computer engineering.

All biological systems with vision move about their environments and successfully perform many tasks. The same capabilities are needed in the world of robots. To that end, recent results in empirical fields that study insects and primates, as well as in theoretical and applied disciplines that design robots, have uncovered a number of the principles of navigation. To offer a unifying approach to the situation, this book brings together ideas from zoology, psychology, neurobiology, mathematics, geometry, computer science, and engineering. It contains theoretical developments that will be essential in future research on the topic -- especially new representations of space with less complexity than Euclidean representations possess. These representations allow biological and artificial systems to compute from images in order to successfully deal with their environments.
In this book, the barriers between different disciplines have been smoothed and the workings of vision systems of biological organisms are made clear in computational terms to computer scientists and engineers. At the same time, fundamental principles arising from computational considerations are made clear both to empirical scientists and engineers. Empiricists can generate a number of hypotheses that they could then study through various experiments. Engineers can gain insight for designing robotic systems that perceive aspects of their environment.
For the first time, readers will find:
* the insect vision system presented in a way that can be understood by computational scientists working in computer vision and engineering;
* three complete, working robotic navigation systems presented with all the issues related to their design analyzed in detail;
* the beginning of a computational theory of direct perception, as advocated by Gibson, presented in detail with applications for a variety of problems; and
* the idea that vision systems could compute space representations different from perfect metric descriptions -- and be used in robotic tasks -- advanced for both artificial and biological systems.

People have dreamed of machines, which would free them from unpleasant, dull, dirty and dangerous tasks and work for them as servants, for centuries if not millennia. Service robots seem to finally let these dreams come true. But where are all these robots that eventually serve us all day long, day for day? A few service robots have entered the market: domestic and professional cleaning robots, lawnmowers, milking robots, or entertainment robots. Some of these robots look more like toys or gadgets rather than real robots. But where is the rest? This is a question, which is asked not only by customers, but also by service providers, care organizations, politicians, and funding agencies. The answer is not very satisfying. Today's service robots have their problems operating in everyday environments. This is by far more challenging than operating an industrial robot behind a fence. There is a comprehensive list of technical and scientific problems, which still need to be solved. To advance the state of the art in service robotics towards robots, which are capable of operating in an everyday environment, was the major objective of the DESIRE project (Deutsche Service Robotik Initiative - Germany Service Robotics Initiative) funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant no. 01IME01A. This book offers a sample of the results achieved in DESIRE.

It is my ambition in writing this book to bring tribology to the study of control of machines with friction. Tribology, from the greek for study of rubbing, is the discipline that concerns itself with friction, wear and lubrication. Tribology spans a great range of disciplines, from surface physics to lubrication chemistry and engineering, and comprises investigators in diverse specialities. The English language tribology literature now grows at a rate of some 700 articles per year. But for all of this activity, in the three years that I have been concerned with the control of machines with friction, I have but once met a fellow controls engineer who was aware that the field existed, this including many who were concerned with friction. In this vein I must confess that, before undertaking these investigations, I too was unaware that an active discipline of friction existed. The experience stands out as a mark of the specialization of our time. Within tribology, experimental and theoretical understanding of friction in lubricated machines is well developed. The controls engineer's interest is in dynamics, which is not the central interest of the tribologist. The tribologist is more often concerned with wear, with respect to which there has been enormous progress - witness the many mechanisms which we buy today that are lubricated once only, and that at the factory. Though a secondary interest, frictional dynamics are note forgotten by tribology.

This pioneering book describes the development of a robot mapping and navigation system inspired by models of the neural mechanisms underlying spatial navigation in the rodent hippocampus. Computational models of animal navigation systems have traditionally had limited performance when implemented on robots. This is the first research to test existing models of rodent spatial mapping and navigation on robots in large, challenging, real world environments.

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).

Interleaving Planning and Execution for Autonomous Robots develops a formal representation for interleaving planning and execution in the context of incomplete information. This work bridges the gap between theory and practice in robotics by presenting control architectures that are provably sound, complete and optimal, and then describing real-world implementations of these robot architectures. Dervish, winner of the 1994 AAAI National Robot Contest, is one of the robots featured. Interleaving Planning and Execution for Autonomous Robots is based on the author's PhD research, covering the same material taught in CS 224, the very popular Introduction to Robot Programming Laboratory taught at Stanford for four years by Professor Michael Genesereth and the author.

This book presents lectures given at the 8th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems. As agents evolve in terms of their ability to carry on a dialog with users, several qualities are emerging as essential components of a successful system. Users do not carry on long conversations on only one topic-they tend to switch between several topics. Thus the authors are observing the emergence of multi-domain systems that enable users to seamlessly hop from one domain to another. The systems have become active social partners. Accordingly, work on social dialog has become crucial to active and engaging human-robot/agent interaction. These new systems call for a coherent framework that guides their actions as chatbots and conversational agents. Human-Robot/Agent assessment mechanisms naturally lend themselves to this task. As these systems increasingly assist humans in a multitude of tasks, the ethics of their existence, their design and their interaction with users are becoming crucial issues. This book discusses the essential players and features involved, such as chat-based agents, multi-domain dialog systems, human-robot interaction, social dialog policy, and advanced dialog system architectures.

Nanorobotics and Nanodiagnostics in Integrative Biology and Biomedicine "Nanorobotics and nanodiagnostics" can be defined as a new generation of biohybrid and nanorobotics that translate fundamental biological principles into engineering design rules, or integrative living components into synthetic structures to create biorobots and nanodiagnotics that perform like natural systems. Nanorobots or nanobots are structured of a nanoscale made of individual assemblies. They can be termed as intelligent systems manufactured with self-assembly strategies by chemical, physical and biological approaches. The nanorobot can determine the structure and enhance the adaptability to the environment in interdisciplinary tasks. "Nanorobotics and nanodiagnostics" is a new generation of biohybrid that translates fundamental biological principles into engineering design rules to create biorobots that perform like natural systems. These biorobotics and diagnostics can now perform various missions to be accomplished certain tasks in the research areas such as integrative biology and biomedicine. "Nanorobotics and Nanodiagnostics in Integrative Biology and Biomedicine" sheds light on a comprehensive overview of the multidisciplinary areas that explore nanotherapeutics and nanorobotic manipulation in biology and medicine. It provides up-to-date knowledge of the promising fields of integrative biology and biomedicine for nano-assisted biorobotics and diagnostics to detect and treat diseases that will enable new scientific discoveries.

This book is inspired by the development of distributed model predictive control of networked systems to save computation and communication sources. The significant new contribution is to show how to design efficient DMPCs that can be coordinated asynchronously with the increasing effectiveness of the event-triggering mechanism and how to improve the event-triggered DMPC for different requirements improvement of control performance, extension to interconnected networked systems, etc. The book is likely to be of interest to the persons who are engaged in researching control theory in academic institutes, the persons who go in for developing control systems in R&D institutes or companies, the control engineers who are engaged in the implementation of control algorithms, and people who are interested in the distributed MPC.

Robotic systems are characterized by the intersection of computer intelligence with the physical world. This blend of physical reasoning and computational intelligence is well illustrated by the Tetrobot study described in this book. Tetrobot: A Modular Approach to Reconfigurable Parallel Robotics describes a new approach to the design of robotic systems. The Tetrobot approach utilizes modular components which may be reconfigured into many different mechanisms which are suited to different applications. The Tetrobot system includes two unique contributions: a new mechanism (a multilink spherical joint design), and a new control architecture based on propagation of kinematic solutions through the structure. The resulting Tetrobot system consists of fundamental components which may be mechanically reassembled into any modular configuration, and the control architecture will provide position control of the resulting structure. A prototype Tetrobot system has been built and evaluated experimentally. Tetrobot arms, platforms, and walking machines have been built and controlled in a variety of motion and loading conditions. The Tetrobot system has applications in a variety of domains where reconfiguration, flexibility, load capacity, and failure recovery are important aspects of the task. A number of key research directions have been opened by the Tetrobot research activities. Continuing topics of interest include: development of a more distributed implementation of the computer control architecture, analysis of the dynamics of the Tetrobot system motion for improved control of high-speed motions, integration of sensor systems to control the motion and shape of the high-dimensionality systems, and exploration of self-reconfiguration of the system. Tetrobot: A Modular Approach to Reconfigurable Parallel Robotics will be of interest to research workers, specialists and professionals in the areas of robotics, mechanical systems and computer engineering.

For some time, all branches of the military have used a wide range of sensors to provide data for many purposes, including surveillance, reconnoitring, target detection and battle damage assessment. Many nations have also attempted to utilise these sensors for civilian applications, such as crop monitoring, agricultural disease tracking, environmental diagnostics, cartography, ocean temperature profiling, urban planning, and the characterisation of the Ozone Hole above Antarctica. The recent convergence of several important technologies has made possible new, advanced, high performance, sensor based applications relying on the near-simultaneous fusion of data from an ensemble of different types of sensors. The book examines the underlying principles of sensor operation and data fusion, the techniques and technologies that enable the process, including the operation of 'fusion engines'. Fundamental theory and the enabling technologies of data fusion are presented in a systematic and accessible manner. Applications are discussed in the areas of medicine, meteorology, BDA and targeting, transportation, cartography, the environment, agriculture, and manufacturing and process control.

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 researchareas 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 ?

Human-in-the-loop Learning and Control for Robot Teleoperation presents recent, research progress on teleoperation and robots, including human-robot interaction, learning and control for teleoperation with many extensions on intelligent learning techniques. The book integrates cutting-edge research on learning and control algorithms of robot teleoperation, neural motor learning control, wave variable enhancement, EMG-based teleoperation control, and other key aspects related to robot technology, presenting implementation tactics, adequate application examples and illustrative interpretations. Robots have been used in various industrial processes to reduce labor costs and improve work efficiency. However, most robots are only designed to work on repetitive and fixed tasks, leaving a gap with the human desired manufacturing effect.

This book focuses on the design and analysis of collective decision-making strategies for the best-of-n problem. After providing a formalization of the structure of the best-of-n problem supported by a comprehensive survey of the swarm robotics literature, it introduces the functioning of a collective decision-making strategy and identifies a set of mechanisms that are essential for a strategy to solve the best-of-n problem. The best-of-n problem is an abstraction that captures the frequent requirement of a robot swarm to choose one option from of a finite set when optimizing benefits and costs. The book leverages the identification of these mechanisms to develop a modular and model-driven methodology to design collective decision-making strategies and to analyze their performance at different level of abstractions. Lastly, the author provides a series of case studies in which the proposed methodology is used to design different strategies, using robot experiments to show how the designed strategies can be ported to different application scenarios.

This book provides practical guidance and awareness for a growing body of knowledge developing across a variety of disciplines and many countries. This book is a celebration of the Gavriel Salvendy International Symposium (GSIS) and provides a survey of topics and emerging areas of interest in human-automation interaction. This book for the GSIS emphasizes main thematic areas: manufacturing, services and user experience. Main areas of coverage include Section A: Advanced Production Management and Production Control; Section B: Healthcare Automation; Section C: Measuring and Modeling Human Performance; Section D: Usability and User Experience; Section E: Safety Management and Occupational Ergonomics; Section F: Manufacturing and Services; Section G: Data and Probabilistic Information; Section H: Training and Collaboration Technologies. Contributions from especially early career researchers were featured as part of this (virtual) symposium and celebration. Gavriel Salvendy initiated the conferences that run annually as Human-Computer Interaction International and Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics International (AHFE), both within the Lecture Notes in Springer. The book is inclusive of human-computer interaction and human factors and ergonomics principles, yet it is intended to serve a much wider audience that has interest in automation and human modeling. The emerging need for human-automation interaction expertise has developed from an ever-growing availability and presence of automation in our everyday lives.

Technology is rapidly advancing in all areas of society, including agriculture. In both conventional and organic systems, there is a need to apply technology beyond our current approach to improve the efficiency and economics of management. Weeds, in particular, have been part of cropping systems for centuries often being ranked as the number one production cost. Now, public demand for a sustainably grown product has created economic incentives for producers to improve their practices, yet the development of advanced weed control tools beyond biotech has lagged behind. An opportunity has been created for engineers and weed scientists to pool their knowledge and work together to 'fill the gap' in managing weeds in crops. Never before has there been such pressure to produce more with less in order to sustain our economies and environments. This book is the first to provide a radically new approach to weed management that could change cropping systems both now and in the future.

Large scale optical mapping methods are in great demand among scientists who study different aspects of the seabed, and have been fostered by impressive advances in the capabilities of underwater robots in gathering optical data from the seafloor. Cost and weight constraints mean that low-cost ROVs usually have a very limited number of sensors. When a low-cost robot carries out a seafloor survey using a down-looking camera, it usually follows a predefined trajectory that provides several non time-consecutive overlapping image pairs. Finding these pairs (a process known as topology estimation) is indispensable to obtaining globally consistent mosaics and accurate trajectory estimates, which are necessary for a global view of the surveyed area, especially when optical sensors are the only data source. This book contributes to the state-of-art in large area image mosaicing methods for underwater surveys using low-cost vehicles equipped with a very limited sensor suite. The main focus has been on global alignment and fast topology estimation, which are the most challenging steps in creating large area image mosaics. This book is intended to emphasise the importance of the topology estimation problem and to present different solutions using interdisciplinary approaches opening a way to further develop new strategies and methodologies.

The articles of this book were reported and discussed at the fifth international symposium on Advances in Robot Kinematics. As is known, the first symposium of this series was organised in 1988 in Ljubljana. The following meetings took place every other year in Austria, Italy, and Slovenia (Linz, Ferrara, Ljubljana, Portoroz Bernardin). It must be emphasised that the symposia run under the patronage of the International Federation for the Theory of Machinesand Mechanisms, IFToMM. In this period, Advances in Robot Kinematics has been able to attract the most outstanding authors in the area and also to create an optimum combination of a scientific pragmatism and a friendly atmosphere. Hence, it has managed to survive in a strong competition of many international conferences and meetings. In the most ancient way, robot kinematics is regarded as an application of the kinematics of rigid hodies. However, there are topics and problems that are typical for robot kinematics that cannot easily be found in any other scientific field. It is our belief that the initiative of Advances in Robot Kinematics has contributed to develop a remarkable scientific community. The present book is of interest to researchers, doctoral students and teachers, engineers and mathematicians specialising in kinematics of robots and mechanisms, mathematical modelling, simulation, design, and control of robots."

By proposing and forming a mobile manipulator for modern multi-floor buildings, A Robotic Framework for the Mobile Manipulator: Theory and Application helps readers visualize an end-to-end workflow for making a robot system work in a targeted environment. From a product-oriented viewpoint, this book is considered as a bridge from theories to real products, in which robotic software modules and the robotic system integration are mainly concerned. In the end, readers will have an overview of how to build and integrate various single robotic modules to execute a list of designed tasks in the real world, as well as how to make a robot system work independently, without human interventions. With references and execution guidelines provided at the end of each chapter, the book will be a useful tool for developers and researchers looking to expand their knowledge about the robotics and the robotic software.