This book on computing systems for autonomous driving takes a comprehensive look at the state-of-the-art computing technologies, including computing frameworks, algorithm deployment optimizations, systems runtime optimizations, dataset and benchmarking, simulators, hardware platforms, and smart infrastructures. The objectives of level 4 and level 5 autonomous driving require colossal improvement in the computing for this cyber-physical system. Beginning with a definition of computing systems for autonomous driving, this book introduces promising research topics and serves as a useful starting point for those interested in starting in the field. In addition to the current landscape, the authors examine the remaining open challenges to achieve L4/L5 autonomous driving. Computing Systems for Autonomous Driving provides a good introduction for researchers and prospective practitioners in the field. The book can also serve as a useful reference for university courses on autonomous vehicle technologies.This book on computing systems for autonomous driving takes a comprehensive look at the state-of-the-art computing technologies, including computing frameworks, algorithm deployment optimizations, systems runtime optimizations, dataset and benchmarking, simulators, hardware platforms, and smart infrastructures. The objectives of level 4 and level 5 autonomous driving require colossal improvement in the computing for this cyber-physical system. Beginning with a definition of computing systems for autonomous driving, this book introduces promising research topics and serves as a useful starting point for those interested in starting in the field. In addition to the current landscape, the authors examine the remaining open challenges to achieve L4/L5 autonomous driving. Computing Systems for Autonomous Driving provides a good introduction for researchers and prospective practitioners in the field. The book can also serve as a useful reference for university courses on autonomous vehicle technologies.

This book focuses on pose estimation algorithms for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). After introducing readers to the state of the art, it describes a joint endeavor involving attitude and position estimation, and details the development of a nonlinear attitude observer that employs inertial and magnetic field data and is suitable for underwater use. In turn, it shows how the estimated attitude constitutes an essential type of input for UKF-based position estimators that combine position, depth, and velocity measurements. The book discusses the possibility of including real-time estimates of sea currents in the developed estimators, and highlights simulations that combine real-world navigation data and experimental test campaigns to evaluate the performance of the resulting solutions. In addition to proposing novel algorithms for estimating the attitudes and positions of AUVs using low-cost sensors and taking into account magnetic disturbances and ocean currents, the book provides readers with extensive information and a source of inspiration for the further development and testing of navigation algorithms for AUVs.

This book contains the papers that were presented at the 17th International Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR). The ISRR promotes the development and dissemination of groundbreaking research and technological innovation in robotics useful to society by providing a lively, intimate, forward-looking forum for discussion and debate about the current status and future trends of robotics with great emphasis on its potential role to benefit humankind. The symposium contributions contained in this book report on a variety of new robotics research results covering a broad spectrum organized into the categories: design, control; grasping and manipulation, planning, robot vision, and robot learning.

This book presents the proceedings of the 5th IFToMM Symposium on Mechanism Design for Robotics, MEDER 2021, held in Poitiers, France, 23-25 June 2021. It gathers contributions by researchers from several countries on all major areas of robotic research, development and innovation, as well as new applications and current trends. The topics covered include: theoretical and computational kinematics, mechanism design, experimental mechanics, mechanics of robots, control issues of mechanical systems, machine intelligence, innovative mechanisms and applications, linkages and manipulators, micro-mechanisms, dynamics of machinery and multi-body systems. Given its scope, the book offers a source of information and inspiration for researchers seeking to improve their work and gather new ideas for future developments.

This volume gathers the latest advances, innovations, and applications in the field of intelligent systems such as robots, cyber-physical and embedded systems, as presented by leading international researchers and engineers at the International Conference on Intelligent Technologies in Robotics (ITR), held in Moscow, Russia on October 21-23, 2019. It covers highly diverse topics, including robotics, design and machining, control and dynamics, bio-inspired systems, Internet of Thing, Big Data, RFID technology, blockchain, trusted software, cyber-physical systems (CFS) security, development of CFS in manufacturing, protection of information in CFS, cybersecurity of CFS. The contributions, which were selected by means of a rigorous international peer-review process, highlight numerous exciting ideas that will spur novel research directions and foster multidisciplinary collaboration among different specialists, demonstrating that intelligent systems will drive the technological and societal change in the coming decades.

Fundamental Design and Automation Technologies in Offshore Robotics introduces technological design, modelling, stability analysis, control synthesis, filtering problem and real time operation of robotics vehicles in offshore environments. The book gives numerical and simulation results in each chapter to reflect the engineering practice yet demonstrate the focus of the developed analysis and synthesis approaches. The book is ideal to be used as a reference book for senior and graduate students. It is written in a way that the presentation is simple, clear, and easy to read and understand which would be appreciated by graduate students. Researchers working on marine vehicles and robotics would be able to find reference material on related topics from the book. The book could be of a significant interest to the researchers within offshore and deep see society, including both academic and industrial parts.

This book features selected papers presented at the 15th International Conference on Electromechanics and Robotics "Zavalishin's Readings" - ER(ZR) 2020, held in Ufa, Russia, on 15-18 April 2020. The contributions, written by professionals, researchers and students, cover topics in the field of automatic control systems, electromechanics, electric power engineering and electrical engineering, mechatronics, robotics, automation and vibration technologies. The Zavalishin's Readings conference was established as a tribute to the memory of Dmitry Aleksandrovich Zavalishin (1900-1968) - a Russian scientist, corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences and founder of the school of valve energy converters based on electric machines and valve converters energy. The first conference was organized by the Institute of Innovative Technologies in Electromechanics and Robotics at the Saint Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation in 2006.

A History Today Book of the Year A world-renowned astronomer and an esteemed science writer make the provocative argument for space exploration without astronauts. Human journeys into space fill us with wonder. But the thrill of space travel for astronauts comes at enormous expense and is fraught with peril. As our robot explorers grow more competent, governments and corporations must ask, does our desire to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars justify the cost and danger? Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees believe that beyond low-Earth orbit, space exploration should proceed without humans. In The End of Astronauts, Goldsmith and Rees weigh the benefits and risks of human exploration across the solar system. In space humans require air, food, and water, along with protection from potentially deadly radiation and high-energy particles, at a cost of more than ten times that of robotic exploration. Meanwhile, automated explorers have demonstrated the ability to investigate planetary surfaces efficiently and effectively, operating autonomously or under direction from Earth. Although Goldsmith and Rees are alert to the limits of artificial intelligence, they know that our robots steadily improve, while our bodies do not. Today a robot cannot equal a geologist's expertise, but by the time we land a geologist on Mars, this advantage will diminish significantly. Decades of research and experience, together with interviews with scientific authorities and former astronauts, offer convincing arguments that robots represent the future of space exploration. The End of Astronauts also examines how spacefaring AI might be regulated as corporations race to privatize the stars. We may eventually decide that humans belong in space despite the dangers and expense, but their paths will follow routes set by robots.

This book provides insights into research in the field of artificial intelligence in combination with robotics technologies. The integration of artificial intelligence and robotic technologies is a highly topical area for researchers and developers from academia and industry around the globe, and it is likely that artificial intelligence will become the main approach for the next generation of robotics research. The tremendous number of artificial intelligence algorithms and big data solutions has significantly extended the range of potential applications for robotic technologies, and has also brought new challenges for the artificial intelligence community. Sharing recent advances in the field, the book features papers by young researchers presented at the 4th International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics 2019 (ISAIR2019), held in Daegu, Korea, on August 20-24, 2019.

This book focuses on the key technologies and scientific problems involved in emotional robot systems, such as multimodal emotion recognition (i.e., facial expression/speech/gesture and their multimodal emotion recognition) and emotion intention understanding, and presents the design and application examples of emotional HRI systems. Aiming at the development needs of emotional robots and emotional human-robot interaction (HRI) systems, this book introduces basic concepts, system architecture, and system functions of affective computing and emotional robot systems. With the professionalism of this book, it serves as a useful reference for engineers in affective computing, and graduate students interested in emotion recognition and intention understanding. This book offers the latest approaches to this active research area. It provides readers with the state-of-the-art methods of multimodal emotion recognition, intention understanding, and application examples of emotional HRI systems.

This volume gathers the proceedings of the Joint International Conference of the XIII International Conference on Mechanisms and Mechanical Transmissions (MTM) and the XXIV International Conference on Robotics (Robotics), held in Timisoara, Romania. It addresses the applications of mechanisms and transmissions in several modern technical fields such as mechatronics, biomechanics, machines, micromachines, robotics and apparatus. In doing so, it combines theoretical findings and experimental testing. The book presents peer-reviewed papers written by researchers specialized in mechanism analysis and synthesis, dynamics of mechanisms and machines, mechanical transmissions, biomechanics, precision mechanics, mechatronics, micromechanisms and microactuators, computational and experimental methods, CAD in mechanism and machine design, mechanical design of robot architecture, parallel robots, mobile robots, micro and nano robots, sensors and actuators in robotics, intelligent control systems, biomedical engineering, teleoperation, haptics, and virtual reality.

Human-Robot Interaction: Safety, Standardization, and Benchmarking provides a comprehensive introduction to the new scenarios emerging where humans and robots interact in various environments and applications on a daily basis. The focus is on the current status and foreseeable implications of robot safety, approaching these issues from the standardization and benchmarking perspectives. Featuring contributions from leading experts, the book presents state-of-the-art research, and includes real-world applications and use cases. It explores the key leading sectors-robotics, service robotics, and medical robotics-and elaborates on the safety approaches that are being developed for effective human-robot interaction, including physical robot-human contacts, collaboration in task execution, workspace sharing, human-aware motion planning, and exploring the landscape of relevant standards and guidelines. Features Presenting a comprehensive introduction to human-robot interaction in a number of domains, including industrial robotics, medical robotics, and service robotics Focusing on robot safety standards and benchmarking Providing insight into current developments in international standards Featuring contributions from leading experts, actively pursuing new robot development

This book presents social welfare functions as a unified multidisciplinary framework for various resource allocation problems. By measuring the impact of local decisions on broader society, social welfare functions enable "socialized" decisions and thereby produce an emergent property that "global" balance and welfare emerge from "local" welfare-maximizing behaviors. Social welfare functions are originally used in economics to quantify income welfare, jointly considering average and inequality to arrive at better measures of welfare than average alone. Wishing the readers to find opportunities for their problems of interest, this book introduces research results of social welfare functions applied in five different engineering applications, defining welfare metrics pertaining to the characteristics of the application. The "energy welfare" in wireless sensor network measures richness of distributed sensors in energy. The "preparedness welfare" in emergency medical services quantifies the preparedness level of an entire service area by aggregating preparedness levels of individual zones. The "preference welfare" in intelligent shared environments represents the opinions of real people for groups. The "resource welfare" in multi-robot task allocation quantifies the efficiency of utilizing distributed resources across robots. The "utility welfare" in complex cyber-physical systems quantifies the impact of local resource sharing decisions on the broader task communities.

This book focuses on gyro-free inertial navigation technology, which is used to measure not only linear motion parameters but also angular rates. Since no gyroscopes are used, the key technologies, such as initial alignment, attitude resolution, and error calibration, are very different than those used in traditional methods. Discussing each key technology in gyro-free inertial navigation system (GFINS) manufacture in a separate chapter, the book features easy-to-understand, detailed illustrations, to allow all those involved in inertial navigation to gain a better grasp of GFINS manufacture, including accelerometer setting principles; initial alignment; quaternion-based, attitude resolution algorithms; and accelerometer de-noise methods.

This book describes the development of portable, wearable, and highly customizable hand exoskeletons to aid patients suffering from hand disabilities. It presents an original approach for the design of human hand motion assistance devices that relies on (i) an optimization-based kinematic scaling procedure, which guarantees a significant adaptability to the user's hands motion, and (ii) a topology optimization-based design methodology, which allowed the design of a lightweight, comfortable device with a high level of performance. The book covers the whole process of hand exoskeleton development, from establishing a new design strategy, to the construction and testing of hand exoskeleton prototypes, using additive manufacturing techniques. As such, it offers timely information to both researchers and engineers developing human motion assistance systems, especially wearable ones.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the third international conference AsiaHaptics 2018, held in Songdo, Korea. It presents the state-of-the-art of the diverse haptics (touch)-related research, including perception and illusion, development of haptics devices, and applications to a wide variety of fields such as education, medicine, telecommunication, navigation and entertainment. This book is a valuable resource not only for active haptics researchers, but also for general readers wishing to understand the status quo in this interdisciplinary area of science and technology.

This book describes active illumination techniques in computer vision. We can classify computer vision techniques into two classes: passive and active techniques. Passive techniques observe the scene statically and analyse it as is. Active techniques give the scene some actions and try to facilitate the analysis. In particular, active illumination techniques project specific light, for which the characteristics are known beforehand, to a target scene to enable stable and accurate analysis of the scene. Traditional passive techniques have a fundamental limitation. The external world surrounding us is three-dimensional; the image projected on a retina or an imaging device is two-dimensional. That is, reduction of one dimension has occurred. Active illumination techniques compensate for the dimensional reduction by actively controlling the illumination. The demand for reliable vision sensors is rapidly increasing in many application areas, such as robotics and medical image analysis. This book explains this new endeavour to explore the augmentation of reduced dimensions in computer vision. This book consists of three parts: basic concepts, techniques, and applications. The first part explains the basic concepts for understanding active illumination techniques. In particular, the basic concepts of optics are explained so that researchers and engineers outside the field can understand the later chapters. The second part explains currently available active illumination techniques, covering many techniques developed by the authors. The final part shows how such active illumination techniques can be applied to various domains, describing the issue to be overcome by active illumination techniques and the advantages of using these techniques. This book is primarily aimed at 4th year undergraduate and 1st year graduate students, and will also help engineers from fields beyond computer vision to use active illumination techniques. Additionally, the book is suitable as course material for technical seminars.

Knowledge and Technology Integration in Production and Services presents novel application scenarios for balanced distributed and integrated systems based on knowledge and up-to-date technology and provides a great opportunity for discussion of concepts, models, methodologies, technological developments, case studies, new research ideas, and other results among specialists. It comprises the proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information Technology for BALANCED AUTOMATION SYSTEMS in Manufacturing and Services (BASYS'02), which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in September 2002 in Cancun, Mexico.

This book gathers papers from the 23rd International Forum on Advanced Microsystems for Automotive Applications (AMAA 2020) held online from Berlin, Germany, on May 26-27, 2020. Focusing on intelligent system solutions for auto mobility and beyond, it discusses in detail innovations and technologies enabling electrification, automation and diversification, as well as strategies for a better integration of vehicles into the networks of traffic, data and power. Further, the book addresses other relevant topics, including the role of human factors and safety issues in automated driving, solutions for shared mobility, as well as automated bus transport in rural areas. Implications of current circumstances, such as those generated by climate change, on the future development of auto mobility, are also analysed, providing researchers, practitioners and policy makers with an authoritative snapshot of the state-of-the-art, and a source of inspiration for future developments and collaborations.

This book is a compilation of advanced research and applications on robotic item picking and warehouse automation for e-commerce applications. The works in this book are based on results that came out of the Amazon Robotics Challenge from 2015-2017, which focused on fully automated item picking in a warehouse setting, a topic that has been assumed too complicated to solve or has been reduced to a more tractable form of bin picking or single-item table top picking. The book's contributions reveal some of the top solutions presented from the 50 participant teams. Each solution works to address the time-constraint, accuracy, complexity, and other difficulties that come with warehouse item picking. The book covers topics such as grasping and gripper design, vision and other forms of sensing, actuation and robot design, motion planning, optimization, machine learning and artificial intelligence, software engineering, and system integration, among others. Through this book, the authors describe how robot systems are built from the ground up to do a specific task, in this case, item picking in a warehouse setting. The compiled works come from the best robotics research institutions and companies globally.

This book highlights recent research on interval methods for solving nonlinear constraint satisfaction, optimization and similar problems. Further, it presents a comprehensive survey of applications in various branches of robotics, artificial intelligence systems, economics, control theory, dynamical systems theory, and others. Three appendices, on the notation, representation of numbers used as intervals' endpoints, and sample implementations of the interval data type in several programming languages, round out the coverage.

This book is of interest to researchers wanting to know more about the latest topics and methods in the fields of the kinematics, control and design of robotic systems. The papers cover the full range of robotic systems, including serial, parallel and cable-driven manipulators. The systems range from being less than fully mobile, to kinematically redundant, to over-constrained. The book brings together 43 peer-reviewed papers. They report on the latest scientific and applied achievements. The main theme that connects them is the movement of robots in the most diverse areas of application.

This volume contains the papers of the 7th International Workshop on Medical and Service Robots (MESROB) which was held in Basel, Switzerland, on June 7-9, 2021. The main topics include: design of medical devices, kinematics and dynamics for medical robotics, exoskeletons and prostheses, anthropomorphic hands, therapeutic robots and rehabilitation, cognitive robots, humanoid and service robots, assistive robots and elderly assistance, surgical robots, human-robot interfaces, haptic devices, medical treatments, medical lasers, and surgical planning and navigation. The contributions, which were selected by means of a rigorous international peer-review process, highlight numerous exciting ideas that will spur novel research directions and foster multidisciplinary collaboration among different specialists, demonstrating that medical and service robotics will drive the technological and societal change in the coming decades.

This book offers a timely and comprehensive snapshot of research and developments in the fields of dynamic systems and control engineering. Covering a wide range of theoretical and practical issues, the contributions describes a number of different control approaches, such as PID control, adaptive control, nonlinear systems and control, intelligent monitoring and control based on fuzzy and neural systems, robust control systems, and real time control, among others. Sensors and actuators, measurement systems, renewable energy systems, aeronautic and aerospace systems as well as industrial control and automation, are also comprehensively covered. Based on the proceedings of the 15th APCA International Conference on Automatic Control and Soft Computing, held on July 6-8, 2022, in Caparica, Portugal, the book offers a timely and thoroughly survey of the latest research in the fields of dynamic systems and automatic control engineering, and a source of inspiration for researchers and professionals worldwide.