This book contains the papers of the 7th International Workshop on Medical and Service Robots (MESROB) that was planned to be held in Basel, Switzerland, in July 2020. Since the conference could not be held due to the worldwide Corona pandemic, the proceedings are published in this book and presentation of the accepted papers will be postponed to next year's conference (MESROB 2021). The main topics of the workshop 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 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.

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.

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 ?

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.

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.

The use of small unoccupied aerial systems (sUAS) for acquiring close-range remotely sensed data has substantially increased in the past 5 years. A primary focus of early research was on physical systems and photogrammetric techniques. However, as sUAS technology continues to improve and more sophisticated payloads are utilized, such as lidar and multispectral cameras, applications have expanded to nearly all subdisciplines within Geography. This edited volume is intended to showcase the various ways in which sUAS are used in geographic research, including geomorphology, environmental and hazard monitoring, biogeography, and urban and sociocultural geography.

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.

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.

This book illustrates the main characteristics, challenges and optimisation requirements of robotic disassembly. It provides a comprehensive insight on two crucial optimisation problems in the areas of robotic disassembly through a group of unified mathematical models. The online and offline optimisation of the operational sequence to dismantle a product, for example, is represented with a list of conflicting objectives and constraints. It allows the decision maker and the robots to match the situation automatically and efficiently. To identify a generic solution under different circumstances, classical metaheuristics that can be used for the optimisation of robotic disassembly are introduced in detail. A flexible framework is then presented to implement existing metaheuristics for sequence planning and line balancing in the circumstance of robotic disassembly. Optimisation of Robotic Disassembly for Remanufacturing provides practical case studies on typical product instances to help practitioners design efficient robotic disassembly with minimal manual operation, and offers comparisons of the state-of-the-art metaheuristics on solving the key optimisation problems. Therefore, it will be of interest to engineers, researchers, and postgraduate students in the area of remanufacturing.

This book addresses problems in the modeling, detection, and control of emergent behaviors and task coordination in multiagent systems. It presents a unified solution to such problems in terms of distributed estimation, distributed control, and optimization of interaction topologies and dynamics. Four aspects of the technical solutions in the book are presented: First, the impact of interaction dynamics on the convergence conditions related to interaction topologies is discussed, utilizing a discontinuous cooperative control algorithm of updated design. Second, distributed least-squares and Kalman filtering algorithms for agents with limited interactions are elaborated upon. Third, a general framework of distributed nonlinear control is established, and distributed adaptive control for nonlinear systems with more general uncertainties is presented. Based on the proposed framework, a distributed nonlinear controller is designed to deal with task coordination of robotic systems with nonholonomic constraints. Finally, the problem of optimal multiagent task coordination is addressed and solutions based on approximate dynamic programming and approximate distributed gradient estimation are presented. Emergent Behavior Detection and Task Coordination for Multiagent Systems is of interest to practicing engineers in areas such as robotics and cyber-physical systems, researchers in the field of systems, controls, and robotics, and senior undergraduate and graduate students.

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.

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.

Examines various speech technologies deployed in healthcare service robots to maximize the robot's ability to interpret user input. Demonstrates how robot anthropomorphic features and etiquette in behavior promotes user-positive emotions, acceptance of robots, and compliance with robot requests. Analyzes how multimodal medical-service robots and other cyber-physical systems can reduce mistakes and mishaps in the operating room. Evaluates various input methods for improving acceptance of robots in the older adult population. Presents case studies of cognitively and socially engaging robots in the long-term care setting for helping older adults with activities of daily living and in the pediatric setting for helping children with autism spectrum conditions and metabolic disorders. Speech and Automata in Health Care forges new ground by closely analyzing how three separate disciplines - speech technology, robotics, and medical/surgical/assistive care - intersect with one another, resulting in an innovative way of diagnosing and treating both juvenile and adult illnesses and conditions. This includes the use of speech-enabled robotics to help the elderly population cope with common problems associated with aging caused by the diminution in their sensory, auditory and motor capabilities. By examining the emerging nexus of speech, automata, and health care, the authors demonstrate the exciting potential of automata, both speech-driven and multimodal, to affect the healthcare delivery system so that it better meets the needs of the populations it serves. This book provides both empirical research findings and incisive literature reviews that demonstrate some of the more novel uses of speech-enabled and multimodal automata in the operating room, hospital ward, long-term care facility, and in the home. Studies backed by major universities, research institutes, and by EU-funded collaborative projects are debuted in this volume. This volume provides a wealth of timely material for industrial engineers, speech scientists, computational linguists, and for signal processing and intelligent systems design experts. Topics include: Spoken Interaction with Healthcare Robots Service Robot Feature Effects on Patient Acceptance/Emotional Response Designing Embodied and Virtual Agents for the Operating Room The Emerging Role of Robotics for Personal Health Management in the Older-Adult Population Why Input Methods for Robots that Serve the Older Adult Are Critical for Usability Socially and Cognitively Engaging Robots in the Long-Term Care Setting Voice-Enabled Assistive Robots for Managing Autism Spectrum Conditions ASR and TTS for Voice-Controlled Robot Interactions in Treating Children with Metabolic Disorders

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 systematically presents the most recent progress in stability and control of impulsive systems with delays. Impulsive systems have recently attracted continued high research interests because they provide a natural framework for mathematical modeling of many real-world processes. It focuses not only on impulsive delayed systems, but also impulsive systems with delayed impulses and impulsive systems with event-triggered mechanism, including their Lyapunov stability, finite-time stability and input-to-state stability synthesis. Special attention is paid to the bilateral effects of the delayed impulses, where comprehensive stability properties are discussed in the framework of time-dependent and state-dependent delays. New original work with event-triggered impulsive control and its applications in multi-agent systems and collective dynamics are also provided. This book will be of use to specialists who are interested in the theory of impulsive differential equations and impulsive control theory, as well as high technology specialists who work in the fields of complex networks and applied mathematics. Also, instructors teaching graduate courses and graduate students will find this book a valuable source of nonlinear system theory.

This book is dedicated for engineers and researchers who would like to increase the knowledge in area of mobile mapping systems. Therefore, the flow of the derived information is divided into subproblems corresponding to certain mobile mapping data and related observations' equations. The proposed methodology is not fulfilling all SLAM aspects evident in the literature, but it is based on the experience within the context of the pragmatic and realistic applications. Thus, it can be supportive information for those who are familiar with SLAM and would like to have broader overview in the subject. The novelty is a complete and interdisciplinary methodology for large-scale mobile mapping applications. The contribution is a set of programming examples available as supportive complementary material for this book. All observation equations are implemented, and for each, the programming example is provided. The programming examples are simple C++ implementations that can be elaborated by students or engineers; therefore, the experience in coding is not mandatory. Moreover, since the implementation does not require many additional external programming libraries, it can be easily integrated with any mobile mapping framework. Finally, the purpose of this book is to collect all necessary observation equations and solvers to build computational system capable providing large-scale maps.

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."

Distributed robotics is an interdisciplinary and rapidly growing area, combining research in computer science, communication and control systems, and electrical and mechanical engineering. Distributed robotic systems can autonomously solve complex problems while operating in highly unstructured real-world environments. They are expected to play a major role in addressing future societal needs, for example, by improving environmental impact assessment, food supply, transportation, manufacturing, security, and emergency and rescue services. The goal of the International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS) is to provide a forum for scientific advances in the theory and practice of distributed autonomous robotic systems. This volume of proceedings include 47 original contributions presented at the 13th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS 2016), which was held at the Natural History Museum in London, UK, from November 7th to 9th, 2016. The selected papers in this volume are authored by leading researchers from around the world, thereby providing a broad coverage and perspective of the state-of-the-art technologies, algorithms, system architectures, and applications in distributed robotic systems. The book is organized into seven parts, representative of critical long-term and emerging research thrusts in the multi-robot community: Distributed Coverage and Exploration; Multi-Robot Control; Multi-Robot Estimation; Multi-Robot Planning; Modular Robots and Smart Materials; Swarm Robotics; and Multi-Robot Systems in Applications.

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 open access book is a compilation of selected papers from 2020 DigitalFUTURES-The 2nd International Conference on Computational Design and Robotic Fabrication (CDRF 2020). The book focuses on novel techniques for computational design and robotic fabrication. The contents make valuable contributions to academic researchers, designers, and engineers in the industry. As well, readers will encounter new ideas about understanding intelligence in architecture.

This volume contains the papers of the 1st Workshop IFToMM for Sustainable Development Goals (I4SDG), held online on November 25-26, 2021. The main topics of the workshop include the aspects of theory, design and practice of mechanism and machine science which are instrumental in reaching a sustainable development, such as: biomechanical engineering, sustainable energy systems, robotics and mechatronics, green tribology, computational kinematics, dynamics of machinery, industrial applications of mechanism design, gearing and transmissions, multibody dynamics rotor dynamics, vibrations, humanitarian engineering, and socio-technical systems for sustainable and inclusive development. 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.