- the book provides a short and accessible introduction to AI for learners - it examines seven different educational roles and settings, from AI as a peer to AI as a tutor and AI as textbook, among others - it considers both opportunities and risks: technological developments as well as ethical considerations

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 ?

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.

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.

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."

Intended as an introduction to robot mechanics for students of mechanical, industrial, electrical, and bio-mechanical engineering, this graduate text presents a wide range of approaches and topics. It avoids formalism and proofs but nonetheless discusses advanced concepts and contemporary applications. It will thus also be of interest to practicing engineers. The book begins with kinematics, emphasizing an approach based on rigid-body displacements instead of coordinate transformations; it then turns to inverse kinematic analysis, presenting the widely used Pieper-Roth and zero-reference-position methods. This is followed by a discussion of workplace characterization and determination. One focus of the discussion is the motion made possible by sperical and other novel wrist designs. The text concludes with a brief discussion of dynamics and control. An extensive bibliography provides access to the current literature.

This book collects the main results of the Advanced Grant project RoDyMan funded by the European Research Council. As a final demonstrator of the project, a pizza-maker robot was realized. This represents a perfect example of understanding the robot challenge, considering every inexperienced person's difficulty preparing a pizza. Through RoDyMan, the opportunity was to merge all the acquired competencies in advancing the state of the art in nonprehensile dynamic manipulation, which is the most complex manipulation task, considering deformable objects. This volume is intended to present Ph.D. students and postgraduates working on deformable object perception and robot manipulation control the results achieved within RoDyMan and propose cause for reflection of future developments. The RoDyMan project culminating with this book is meant as a tribute to Naples, the hosting city of the project, an avant-garde city in robotics technology, automation, gastronomy, and art culture.

A famous French writer, Anatole France, liked to say, "The future is a convenient place to position our dreams" (1927). Indeed, this remark gains full meaning when one considers the history of what we call today "Robotics." For more than 3000 years, mankind has dreamt ofthe possibility of arti ficial machines that would have all the advantages of human slaves without any of their drawbacks. With the developments in technology since the end of World War II, mainly with the explosive progress of computers, it was thought we might at last succeed in transforming this everlasting dream into reality. In the mind of scientists of the 1950's, to make such intelligent and autonomous machines before the year 2000 seemed a small challenge: it was obvious, thanks to computers and Artificial Intelligence. But, in spite of progress in some directions, we must admit that the dream remains a dream and that the basic problems denying us a successful issue are not solved. In fact, if we except industrial robots, only calling for classical automata theory, the main advanced result concerning autonomous and intelligent machines is related to some understanding of reasons why we have failed during the past years."

The International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER) is a series of bi-annual meetings which are organized in a rotating fashion around North America, Europe and Asia/Oceania. The goal of ISER is to provide a forum for research in robotics that focuses on novelty of theoretical contributions validated by experimental results. The meetings are conceived to bring together, in a small group setting, researchers from around the world who are in the forefront of experimental robotics research.

This unique reference presents the latest advances across the various fields of robotics, with ideas that are not only conceived conceptually but also verified experimentally. It collects contributions on the current developments and new directions in the field of experimental robotics, which are based on the papers presented at the Ninth ISER held in Singapore.

This book presents the proceedings of the 6th IFToMM Asian Mechanisms and Machine Science Conference (Asian MMS), held in Hanoi, Vietnam on December 15-18, 2021. It includes peer-reviewed papers on the latest advances in mechanism and machine science, discussing topics such as biomechanical engineering, computational kinematics, the history of mechanism and machine science, gearing and transmissions, multi-body dynamics, robotics and mechatronics, the dynamics of machinery, tribology, vibrations, rotor dynamics and vehicle dynamics. A valuable, up-to-date resource, it offers an essential overview of the subject for scientists and practitioners alike, and will inspire further investigations and research.

This book proposes a new approach to handle the problem of limited training data. Common approaches to cope with this problem are to model the shape variability independently across predefined segments or to allow artificial shape variations that cannot be explained through the training data, both of which have their drawbacks. The approach presented uses a local shape prior in each element of the underlying data domain and couples all local shape priors via smoothness constraints. The book provides a sound mathematical foundation in order to embed this new shape prior formulation into the well-known variational image segmentation framework. The new segmentation approach so obtained allows accurate reconstruction of even complex object classes with only a few training shapes at hand.

This book presents the state of the art in distributed autonomous systems composed of multiple robots, robotic modules, or robotic agents. Swarms in nature can not only adapt to their environments, but can also construct suitable habitats to their own advantage. Distributed autonomous robotic systems can do many things that its individuals cannot do alone. As the global pandemic was still ongoing, the 15th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS2021) was held on June 1-4, 2021, as an online meeting. The scope of DARS201 was to create a bridge between biologists and engineers interested in the distributed intelligence of living things and to establish a new academic field by integrating knowledge from both disciplines. Topics of DARS2021 were swarm intelligence, swarm robotics, multi-agent system, modular robotics, decentralized control, distributed system, etc. The papers in this book provide a very good overview of the state of the art in distributed autonomous robotic systems (DARS). They reflect current research themes in DARS with important contributions. We hope that this book helps to sustain the interest in DARS and triggers new research.

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.

Artificial intelligence and related technologies are changing both the law and the legal profession. In particular, technological advances in fields ranging from machine learning to more advanced robots, including sensors, virtual realities, algorithms, bots, drones, self-driving cars, and more sophisticated "human-like" robots are creating new and previously unimagined challenges for regulators. These advances also give rise to new opportunities for legal professionals to make efficiency gains in the delivery of legal services. With the exponential growth of such technologies, radical disruption seems likely to accelerate in the near future. This collection brings together a series of contributions by leading scholars in the newly emerging field of artificial intelligence, robotics, and the law. The aim of the book is to enrich legal debates on the social meaning and impact of this type of technology. The distinctive feature of the contributions presented in this edition is that they address the impact of these technological developments in a number of different fields of law and from the perspective of diverse jurisdictions. Moreover, the authors utilize insights from multiple related disciplines, in particular social theory and philosophy, in order to better understand and address the legal challenges created by AI. Therefore, the book will contribute to interdisciplinary debates on disruptive new AI technologies and the law.