This book presents theoretical modeling and numerical simulations applied to drive several applications towards Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR 4.0). The topics discussed range from theoretical parts to extensive simulations involving many efficient algorithms as well as various statistical techniques. This book is suitable for postgraduate students, researchers as well as other scientists who are working in mathematics, statistics and numerical modeling and simulation.

This book describes the application of vision-sensing technologies in welding processes, one of the key technologies in intelligent welding manufacturing. Gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) is one of the main welding techniques and has a wide range of applications in the manufacturing industry. As such, the book also explores the application of AI technologies, such as vision sensing and machine learning, in GTAW process sensing and feature extraction and monitoring, and presents the state-of-the-art in computer vision, image processing and machine learning to detect welding defects using non-destructive methods in order to improve welding productivity. Featuring the latest research from ORNL (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) using digital image correlation technology, this book will appeal to researchers, scientists and engineers in the field of advanced manufacturing.

This book is the sixth volume of the successful book series on Robot Operating System: The Complete Reference. The objective of the book is to provide the reader with comprehensive coverage of the Robot Operating Systems (ROS) and the latest trends and contributed systems. ROS is currently considered as the primary development framework for robotics applications. There are seven chapters organized into three parts. Part I presents two chapters on the emerging ROS 2.0 framework; in particular, ROS 2.0 is become increasingly mature to be integrated into the industry. The first chapter from Amazon AWS deals with the challenges that ROS 2 developers will face as they transition their system to be commercial-grade. The second chapter deals with reactive programming for both ROS1 and ROS. In Part II, two chapters deal with advanced robotics, namely on the usage of robots in farms, and the second deals with platooning systems. Part III provides three chapters on ROS navigation. The first chapter deals with the use of deep learning for ROS navigation. The second chapter presents a detailed tuning guide on ROS navigation and the last chapter discusses SLAM for ROS applications. I believe that this book is a valuable companion for ROS users and developers to learn more ROS capabilities and features.

This book provides a comprehensive review of fundamental issues in the dynamical modeling and vibration control design for several flexible mechanical systems, such as flexible satellites, flexible aerial refueling hoses, and flexible three-dimensional manipulators. Offering an authoritative reference guide to the dynamics and control of flexible mechanical systems, it equips readers to solve a host of problems concerning these systems. It provides not only a complete overview of flexible systems, but also a better understanding of the technical levels involved. The book is divided into ten chapters: Chapters 1 and 2 lay the foundations, while the remaining chapters explore several independent yet related topics in detail. The book's final chapter presents conclusions and recommendations for future research. Given its scope, the book is intended for researchers, graduate students, and engineers whose work involves control systems, flexible mechanical systems, and related areas.

This book comprises select proceedings of the International Conference on Emerging Trends for Smart Grid Automation and Industry 4.0 (ICETSGAI4.0 2019). The contents discuss the recent trends in smart grid technology and related applications. The topics covered include data analytics for smart grid operation and control, integrated power generation technologies, green technologies as well as advances in microgrid operation and planning. The book highlights the enhancement in technology in the field of smart grids, and how IoT, big data, robotics and automation, artificial intelligence, and wide area measurement have become prerequisites for the fourth industrial revolution, also known as Industry 4.0. The book can be a valuable reference for researchers and professionals interested in smart grid automation incorporating features of Industry 4.0.

This book 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: novel designs and applications of robotic systems, intelligent cooperating and service robots, advanced robot control, human-robot interfaces, robot vision systems, mobile robots, humanoid and walking robots, bio-inspired and swarm robotic systems, aerial, underwater and spatial robots, robots for ambient assisted living, medical robots and bionic prostheses, cognitive robots, cloud robotics, ethical and social issues in robotics, etc. 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. The contents reflect the outcomes of the activities of RAAD (International Conference on Robotics in Alpe-Adria-Danube Region) in 2020.

The book discusses the opportunities and challenges of managing knowledge in the new reality of Industry 4.0. Addressing paradigmatic changes in value creation due to the development of digital technologies applied to manufacturing (additive manufacturing, IoT, robotics, etc.), it includes theoretical and empirical contributions on how Industry 4.0 technologies allow firms to create and exploit knowledge. The carefully selected expert contributions highlight the potential of these technologies in acquiring knowledge from a larger number of sources and examine approaches to innovation, organization of activities, and stakeholder development in the context of this next industrial revolution.

This volume gathers the latest advances, innovations, and applications in the field of geographic information systems and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technologies, as presented by leading researchers and engineers at the 1st International Conference on Unmanned Aerial System in Geomatics (UASG), held in Roorkee, India on April 6-7, 2019. It covers highly diverse topics, including photogrammetry and remote sensing, surveying, UAV manufacturing, geospatial data sensing, UAV processing, visualization, and management, UAV applications and regulations, geo-informatics and geomatics. 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.

This book presents the outcomes of the 12th International Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR 2016). WAFR is a prestigious, single-track, biennial international meeting devoted to recent advances in algorithmic problems in robotics. Robot algorithms are an important building block of robotic systems and are used to process inputs from users and sensors, perceive and build models of the environment, plan low-level motions and high-level tasks, control robotic actuators, and coordinate actions across multiple systems. However, developing and analyzing these algorithms raises complex challenges, both theoretical and practical. Advances in the algorithmic foundations of robotics have applications to manufacturing, medicine, distributed robotics, human-robot interaction, intelligent prosthetics, computer animation, computational biology, and many other areas. The 2016 edition of WAFR went back to its roots and was held in San Francisco, California - the city where the very first WAFR was held in 1994. Organized by Pieter Abbeel, Kostas Bekris, Ken Goldberg, and Lauren Miller, WAFR 2016 featured keynote talks by John Canny on "A Guided Tour of Computer Vision, Robotics, Algebra, and HCI," Erik Demaine on "Replicators, Transformers, and Robot Swarms: Science Fiction through Geometric Algorithms," Dan Halperin on "From Piano Movers to Piano Printers: Computing and Using Minkowski Sums," and by Lydia Kavraki on "20 Years of Sampling Robot Motion." Furthermore, it included an Open Problems Session organized by Ron Alterovitz, Florian Pokorny, and Jur van den Berg. There were 58 paper presentations during the three-day event. The organizers would like to thank the authors for their work and contributions, the reviewers for ensuring the high quality of the meeting, the WAFR Steering Committee led by Nancy Amato as well as WAFR's fiscal sponsor, the International Federation of Robotics Research (IFRR), led by Oussama Khatib and Henrik Christensen. WAFR 2016 was an enjoyable and memorable event.

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.

The primary aim of this volume is to provide researchers and engineers from both academic and industry with up-to-date coverage of new results in the field of robotic welding, intelligent systems and automation. The book is mainly based on papers selected from the 2019 International Workshop on Intelligentized Welding Manufacturing (IWIWM'2019) in USA. The articles show that the intelligentized welding manufacturing (IWM) is becoming an inevitable trend with the intelligentized robotic welding as the key technology. The volume is divided into four logical parts: Intelligent Techniques for Robotic Welding, Sensing of Arc Welding Processing, Modeling and Intelligent Control of Welding Processing, as well as Intelligent Control and its Applications in Engineering.

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.

Control Applications for Biomedical Engineering Systems presents different control engineering and modeling applications in the biomedical field. It is intended for senior undergraduate or graduate students in both control engineering and biomedical engineering programs. For control engineering students, it presents the application of various techniques already learned in theoretical lectures in the biomedical arena. For biomedical engineering students, it presents solutions to various problems in the field using methods commonly used by control engineers.

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 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.

Robotics is an ever-expanding field and intelligent planning continues to play a major role. Given that the intention of mobile robots is to carry out tasks independent from human aid, robot intelligence is needed to make and plan out decisions based on various sensors. Planning is the fundamental activity that implements this intelligence into the mobile robots to complete such tasks. Understanding problems, challenges, and solutions to path planning and how it fits in is important to the realm of robotics. Intelligent Planning for Mobile Robotics: Algorithmic Approaches presents content coverage on the basics of artificial intelligence, search problems, and soft computing approaches. This collection of research provides insight on both robotics and basic algorithms and could serve as a reference book for courses related to robotics, special topics in AI, planning, applied soft computing, applied AI, and applied evolutionary computing. It is an ideal choice for research students, scholars, and professors alike.

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.

As a segment of the broader science of automation, robotics has achieved tremendous progress in recent decades due to the advances in supporting technologies such as computers, control systems, cameras and electronic vision, as well as micro and nanotechnology. Prototyping a design helps in determining system parameters, ranges, and in structuring an overall better system. Robotics is one of the industrial design fields in which prototyping is crucial for improved functionality. Prototyping of Robotic Systems: Applications of Design and Implementation provides a framework for conceptual, theoretical, and applied research in robotic prototyping and its applications. Covering the prototyping of various robotic systems including the complicated industrial robots, the tiny and delicate nanorobots, medical robots for disease diagnosis and treatment, as well as the simple robots for educational purposes, this book is a useful tool for those in the field of robotics prototyping and as a general reference tool for those in related fields.

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 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.

This book focuses on the design, development, and characterization of a compact magnetic laser scanner for microsurgical applications. In addition, it proposes a laser incision depth controller to be used in soft tissue microsurgeries. The use of laser scanners in soft tissue microsurgery results in high quality ablations with minimal thermal damage to surrounding tissue. However, current scanner technologies for microsurgery are limited to free-beam lasers, which require direct line-of-sight to the surgical site, from outside the patient. Developing compact laser micromanipulation systems is crucial to introducing laser-scanning capabilities in hard-to-reach surgical sites, e.g., vocal cords. In this book, the design and fabrication of a magnetically actuated endoscopic laser scanner have been shown, one that introduces high-speed laser scanning for high quality, non-contact tissue ablations in narrow workspaces. Static and dynamic characterization of the system, its teleoperation through a tablet device, and its control modelling for automated trajectory executions have been shown using a fabricated and assembled prototype. Following this, the book discusses how the laser position and velocity control capabilities of the scanner can be used to design a laser incision depth controller to assist surgeons during operations.

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.

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.

Risk detection and cyber security play a vital role in the use and success of contemporary computing. By utilizing the latest technological advances, more effective prevention techniques can be developed to protect against cyber threats. Detecting and Mitigating Robotic Cyber Security Risks is an essential reference publication for the latest research on new methodologies and applications in the areas of robotic and digital security. Featuring extensive coverage on a broad range of topics, such as authentication techniques, cloud security, and mobile robotics, this book is ideally designed for students, researchers, scientists, and engineers seeking current research on methods, models, and implementations of optimized security in digital contexts.