1) Provides a visual approach to the subject of robotics, aiding students and professionals in understanding the topic 2) Demonstrates how to solve problems using simple code, making it accessible to those with limited coding experience 3) Uses real world examples in order to demonstrate concepts in a practical manner 4) Provides a complete set of examples for typical robot manipulator architectures, including Puma, Bending-Backwards, Gantry, Scara, Collaborative and Redundant 5) Uses 6D vectors in order to reduce the computational volume of implementations

This book is a collection of papers on the state of the art in experimental robotics. Experimental Robotics is at the core of validating robotics research for both its systems science and theoretical foundations. Because robotics experiments are carried out on physical, complex machines, of which its controllers are subject to uncertainty, devising meaningful experiments and collecting statistically significant results, pose important and unique challenges in robotics. Robotics experiments serve as a unifying theme for robotics system science and algorithmic foundations. These observations have led to the creation of the International Symposia on Experimental Robotics. The papers in this book were presented at the 2002 International Symposium on Experimental Robotics.

This book is dedicated to user experience design for automated driving to address humane aspects of automated driving, e.g., workload, safety, trust, ethics, and acceptance. Automated driving has experienced a major development boost in recent years. However, most of the research and implementation has been technology-driven, rather than human-centered. The levels of automated driving have been poorly defined and inconsistently used. A variety of application scenarios and restrictions has been ambiguous. Also, it deals with human factors, design practices and methods, as well as applications, such as multimodal infotainment, virtual reality, augmented reality, and interactions in and outside users. This book aims at 1) providing engineers, designers, and practitioners with a broad overview of the state-of-the-art user experience research in automated driving to speed-up the implementation of automated vehicles and 2) helping researchers and students benefit from various perspectives and approaches to generate new research ideas and conduct more integrated research.

Robotic Process Automation will continue its exponential growth over the next five years. With more than 54 vendors, different kinds of tools, generic applicability and as a cognitive and AI platform, RPA has fast become an opportunity that is too good to miss. So, how do you leverage the massive potential business value? Based on four years of research into over 420 business deployments, this book identifies the distinctive leading practices of front-runners, and a Total Value of Ownership (TVO) framework to drive out value across the RPA life-cycle. This book brings a new focus on RPA's strategic potential: the innovations made possible and how to deliver through effective sourcing stakeholder-buy-in, governance, change management, and capability development practices. RPA as a platform, linking with cognitive and AI technologies as part of digital transformation is highlighted. The central messages - think and behave strategically, start right, institutionalize fast, and innovate continuously - are demonstrated, with multiple client experiences, trials and lessons. From dealing with old world process and IT challenges, RPA is now being applied towards building the new digital world and becoming strategic in its application. * Based on extensive new research by world renowned authors * Comprehensive market overview * A systematic set of action principles across the RPA life-cycle * Challenges, and where value is being left on the table * A focus on metrics and Total Value of Ownership * Multiple client case studies * RPA as a foundation for cognitive and AI

This book reports on the latest advances in adaptive critic control with robust stabilization for uncertain nonlinear systems. Covering the core theory, novel methods, and a number of typical industrial applications related to the robust adaptive critic control field, it develops a comprehensive framework of robust adaptive strategies, including theoretical analysis, algorithm design, simulation verification, and experimental results. As such, it is of interest to university researchers, graduate students, and engineers in the fields of automation, computer science, and electrical engineering wishing to learn about the fundamental principles, methods, algorithms, and applications in the field of robust adaptive critic control. In addition, it promotes the development of robust adaptive critic control approaches, and the construction of higher-level intelligent systems.

If you have ever hiked up a steep hill to reach a viewpoint, you will know that sensing can involve the expenditure of effort. More generally, the choice of which movement an intelligent system chooses to make is usually based on information gleaned from sensors. But the information required to make the motion decision may not be immediately to hand, so the system . first has to plan a motion whose purpose is to acquire the needed sensor information. Again, this conforms to our everyday experience: I am in the woods and don't know which direction to go, so I climb up to the ridge to get my bearings; I am lost in a new town, so I plan to drive to the next junction where there is sure to be a roadsign, failing that I will ask someone who seems to be from the locality. Why, if experiences such as these are so familiar, has the problem only recently been recognised and studied in Robotics? One reason is that until quite recently Robotics research was dominated by work on robot arms with limited reach and fixed in a workcell.

It has been stated in psychology that human brain arranges information in a way that improves efficiency in performing common tasks, for example, information about our spatial environment is conveniently structured for efficient route finding. On the other hand, in computational sciences, the use of hierarchical information is well known for reducing the complexity of solving problems. This book studies hierarchical representations of large-scale space and presents a new model, called Multi-AH-graph, that uses multiple hierarchies of abstraction. It allows an agent to represent structural information acquired from the environment (elements such as objects, free space, etc., relations existing between them, such as proximity, similarity, etc. and other types of information, such as colors, shapes, etc). The Multi-AH-graph model extends a single hierarchy representation to a mUltiple hierarchy arrangement, which adapts better to a wider range of tasks, agents, and environments. We also present a system called CLAUDIA, which is an implementation of the task-driven paradigm for automatic construction of multiple abstractions: a set of hierarchies of abstraction will be "good" for an agent if it can reduce the cost of planning and performing certain tasks of the agent in the agent's world. CLAUDIA constructs multiple hierarchies (Multi-AH-graphs) for a given triple , trying to optimize their "goodness".

This book contains the proceedings of the 10th FSR, (Field and Service Robotics) which is the leading single-track conference on applications of robotics in challenging environments. The 10th FSR was held in Toronto, Canada from 23-26 June 2015. The book contains 42 full-length, peer-reviewed papers organized into a variety of topics: Aquatic, Vision, Planetary, Aerial, Underground, and Systems. The goal of the book and the conference is to report and encourage the development and experimental evaluation of field and service robots, and to generate a vibrant exchange and discussion in the community. Field robots are non-factory robots, typically mobile, that operate in complex and dynamic environments: on the ground (Earth or other planets), under the ground, underwater, in the air or in space. Service robots are those that work closely with humans to help them with their lives. The first FSR was held in Canberra, Australia, in 1997. Since that first meeting, FSR has been held roughly every two years, cycling through Asia, Americas, Europe.

Human Centered Robotic Systems must be able to interact with humans such that the burden of adaptation lies with the machine and not with the human. This book collates a set of prominent papers presented during a two-day conference on "Human Centered Robotic Systems" held on November 19-20, 2009, in Bielefeld University, Germany. The aim of the conference was to bring together researchers from the areas of robotics, computer science, psychology, linguistics, and biology who are all focusing on a shared goal of cognitive interaction. A survey of recent approaches, the current state-of-the-art, and possible future directions in this interdisciplinary field is presented. It provides practitioners and scientists with an up-to-date introduction to this dynamic field, with methods and solutions that are likely to significantly impact on our future lives.

Covers all the aspects of a flapping-wing vehicles needed to design one and understand how/why it flies. Explains related engineering practice including fabrication, materials, and manufacturing. Includes CFD analysis of 3D wing profile. Discusses image-based control of group of Ornithopters. Explores indigenous PCB design for achieving altitude and attitude control.

Introduces a new web-based optimizer for Geometric algebra algorithms; Supports many programming languages as well as hardware; Covers the advantages of High-dimensional algebras; Includes geometrically intuitive support of quantum computing

This book reviews the state of the art in the use of organic materals as physical, chemical and biomedical sensors in a variety of application settings. Topics covered include organic semiconductors for chemical and physical sensing; conducting polymers in sensor applications; chemically functionalized organic semiconductors for highly selective sensing; composite organic-inorganic sensors; artificial skin applications; organic thin film transistor strain gauges for biomedical applications; OTFT infrared sensors for touchless human-machine interaction; smart fabric sensors and e-textile technologie; image capture with organic sensors; organic gas sensors and electronic noses; electrolyte gated organic transistors for bio-chemical sensing; ion-selective organic electrochemical transistors; DNA biosensors; metabolic organic sensors; and conductive polymer based sensors for biomedical applications.

This volume explores the intersection of robust intelligence (RI) and trust in autonomous systems across multiple contexts among autonomous hybrid systems, where hybrids are arbitrary combinations of humans, machines and robots. To better understand the relationships between artificial intelligence (AI) and RI in a way that promotes trust between autonomous systems and human users, this book explores the underlying theory, mathematics, computational models, and field applications. It uniquely unifies the fields of RI and trust and frames it in a broader context, namely the effective integration of human-autonomous systems. A description of the current state of the art in RI and trust introduces the research work in this area. With this foundation, the chapters further elaborate on key research areas and gaps that are at the heart of effective human-systems integration, including workload management, human computer interfaces, team integration and performance, advanced analytics, behavior modeling, training, and, lastly, test and evaluation. Written by international leading researchers from across the field of autonomous systems research, Robust Intelligence and Trust in Autonomous Systems dedicates itself to thoroughly examining the challenges and trends of systems that exhibit RI, the fundamental implications of RI in developing trusted relationships with present and future autonomous systems, and the effective human systems integration that must result for trust to be sustained. Contributing authors: David W. Aha, Jenny Burke, Joseph Coyne, M.L. Cummings, Munjal Desai, Michael Drinkwater, Jill L. Drury, Michael W. Floyd, Fei Gao, Vladimir Gontar, Ayanna M. Howard, Mo Jamshidi, W.F. Lawless, Kapil Madathil, Ranjeev Mittu, Arezou Moussavi, Gari Palmer, Paul Robinette, Behzad Sadrfaridpour, Hamed Saeidi, Kristin E. Schaefer, Anne Selwyn, Ciara Sibley, Donald A. Sofge, Erin Solovey, Aaron Steinfeld, Barney Tannahill, Gavin Taylor, Alan R. Wagner, Yue Wang, Holly A. Yanco, Dan Zwillinger.

During the Iraq War, American soldiers were sent to both fight an enemy and to recover a "failed state" in pixelated camouflage uniforms, accompanied by robots, and armed with satellite maps and biometric hand-held scanners. The Iraq War, however, was no digital game: massive-scale physical death and destruction counter the vision of a clean replayable war. The military policy of the United States, and not the actual experience of war, has been rooted in the logic of digital, and nascent algorithmic technology. This logic attempted to reduce culture, society, as well as the physical body and environment into visual data that lacks cultural and historical context. This book details the emergence of a nascent algorithmic war culture in the context of the Iraq War (2003-2010) in relation to the data-driven early 20th century British Mandate for Iraq. Through a series of five inquiries into the ways in which the Iraq War attempted to and often failed to see population and territory as digital and further proto-algorithmic entities, it offers an insight into the digitization and further unmanned automaton of war. It does so through a comparative historical framework reaching back to the quantification techniques harnessed during the British Mandate for Iraq (1918-1932) in order to explicate the parallels and complicated the diversions between the numerical logics that have driven both military state-building enterprises.

AI for Digital Warfare explores how the weaponising of artificial intelligence can and will change how warfare is being conducted, and what impact it will have on the corporate world. With artificial intelligence tools becoming increasingly advanced, and in many cases more humanlike, their potential in psychological warfare is being recognised, which means digital warfare can move beyond just shutting down IT systems into more all-encompassing hybrid war strategies.

UAVs-unmanned aerial vehicles, remotely piloted aircraft; the labels vary-are a disruptive technology on par with computers and smartphones. Present since soon after the dawn of manned aviation, they have become controversial only in recent times. In the United States, the mainstream media has painted them with a broad brush as "drones" with a warlike past, and civil liberties organizations warn of their impact on individual privacy rights. But a promising new industry beckons-UAVs can be useful for farming, filmmaking, law enforcement and sundry other missions. Entrepreneurs and aerospace manufacturers alike want them freed to fly for commercial purposes, and the US Congress has answered with a mandate to make that happen. Caught in the middle is the staid, bureaucratic Federal Aviation Administration, whose sacred mission is to protect the safety of America's skies. Enter the Drones cuts through the hyperbole over UAVs to explain the considerable challenges the FAA faces.

Intersectional Automations explores a range of situations where robotics, biotechnological enhancement, artificial intelligence (AI), and algorithmic culture collide with intersectional social justice issues such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and citizenship. As robots, machine learning applications, and human augmentics are artifacts of human culture, they sometimes carry stereotypes, biases, exclusions, and other forms of privilege into their computational logics, platforms, and/or embodiments. The essays in this multidisciplinary collection consider how questions of equity and social justice impact our understanding of these developments, analyzing not only the artifacts themselves, but also the discourses and practices surrounding them, including societal understandings, design choices, law and policy approaches, and their uses and abuses.

In this book, the author outlines a Robust Web Parking, Truck and Transportation Portal (RWPTTP) for integrating parking and transportation services - a revolutionary approach in contrast to incremental change for managing traffic congestion. Autonomous vehicle technology, artificial intelligence, internet of things (IOT), and other interconnected hardware and software tools will assist autonomous parking and transportation services and provide next-century infrastructure for consolidated transportation customer services. The book highlights currently available autonomous parking and transportation technologies, and the development of an integrated and intelligent transportation service/system (IITS) platform, with specific use of technologies to reconfigure the transportation industry. The author also suggests many regulatory and policy changes to simplify data collection, traffic operation, introduction of a duplicate transportation system using light rail (LRs) and high speed rail (SPRs), and redistribution of parking spaces along such routes, using renewable energy.

This book contains the papers of the European Conference on Mechanisms Science (EUCOMES 2012 Conference). The book presents the most recent research developments in the mechanism and machine science field and their applications.

Topics addressed are theoretical kinematics, computational kinematics, mechanism design, experimental mechanics, mechanics of robots, dynamics of machinery, dynamics of multi-body systems, control issues of mechanical systems, mechanisms for biomechanics, novel designs, mechanical transmissions, linkages and manipulators, micro-mechanisms, teaching methods, history of mechanism science and industrial and non-industrial applications.

Thisvolumewill also serve as an interestingreference for the European activity in the fields of Mechanism and Machine Science as well as a source of inspirations for future works and developments."

In the last decades robots are expected to be of increasing intelligence to deal with a large range of tasks. Especially, robots are supposed to be able to learn manipulation skills from humans. To this end, a number of learning algorithms and techniques have been developed and successfully implemented for various robotic tasks. Among these methods, learning from demonstrations (LfD) enables robots to effectively and efficiently acquire skills by learning from human demonstrators, such that a robot can be quickly programmed to perform a new task. This book introduces recent results on the development of advanced LfD-based learning and control approaches to improve the robot dexterous manipulation. First, there's an introduction to the simulation tools and robot platforms used in the authors' research. In order to enable a robot learning of human-like adaptive skills, the book explains how to transfer a human user's arm variable stiffness to the robot, based on the online estimation from the muscle electromyography (EMG). Next, the motion and impedance profiles can be both modelled by dynamical movement primitives such that both of them can be planned and generalized for new tasks. Furthermore, the book introduces how to learn the correlation between signals collected from demonstration, i.e., motion trajectory, stiffness profile estimated from EMG and interaction force, using statistical models such as hidden semi-Markov model and Gaussian Mixture Regression. Several widely used human-robot interaction interfaces (such as motion capture-based teleoperation) are presented, which allow a human user to interact with a robot and transfer movements to it in both simulation and real-word environments. Finally, improved performance of robot manipulation resulted from neural network enhanced control strategies is presented. A large number of examples of simulation and experiments of daily life tasks are included in this book to facilitate better understanding of the readers.

The new frontiers of robotics research foresee future scenarios where artificial agents will leave the laboratory to progressively take part in the activities of our daily life. This will require robots to have very sophisticated perceptual and action skills in many intelligence-demanding applications, with particular reference to the ability to seamlessly interact with humans. It will be crucial for the next generation of robots to understand their human partners and at the same time to be intuitively understood by them. In this context, a deep understanding of human motion is essential for robotics applications, where the ability to detect, represent and recognize human dynamics and the capability for generating appropriate movements in response sets the scene for higher-level tasks. This book provides a comprehensive overview of this challenging research field, closing the loop between perception and action, and between human-studies and robotics. The book is organized in three main parts. The first part focuses on human motion perception, with contributions analyzing the neural substrates of human action understanding, how perception is influenced by motor control, and how it develops over time and is exploited in social contexts. The second part considers motion perception from the computational perspective, providing perspectives on cutting-edge solutions available from the Computer Vision and Machine Learning research fields, addressing higher-level perceptual tasks. Finally, the third part takes into account the implications for robotics, with chapters on how motor control is achieved in the latest generation of artificial agents and how such technologies have been exploited to favor human-robot interaction. This book considers the complete human-robot cycle, from an examination of how humans perceive motion and act in the world, to models for motion perception and control in artificial agents. In this respect, the book will provide insights into the perception and action loop in humans and machines, joining together aspects that are often addressed in independent investigations. As a consequence, this book positions itself in a field at the intersection of such different disciplines as Robotics, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Psychology, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning. By bridging these different research domains, the book offers a common reference point for researchers interested in human motion for different applications and from different standpoints, spanning Neuroscience, Human Motor Control, Robotics, Human-Robot Interaction, Computer Vision and Machine Learning. Chapter 'The Importance of the Affective Component of Movement in Action Understanding' of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

The International Conference on Intelligent Unmanned Systems 2011 was organized by the International Society of Intelligent Unmanned Systems and locally by the Center for Bio-Micro Robotics Research at Chiba University, Japan. The event was the 7th conference continuing from previous conferences held in Seoul, Korea (2005, 2006), Bali, Indonesia (2007), Nanjing, China (2008), Jeju, Korea (2009), and Bali, Indonesia (2010). ICIUS 2011 focused on both theory and application, primarily covering the topics of robotics, autonomous vehicles, intelligent unmanned technologies, and biomimetics. We invited seven keynote speakers who dealt with related state-of-the-art technologies including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and micro air vehicles (MAVs), flapping wings (FWs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), underwater vehicles (UVs), bio-inspired robotics, advanced control, and intelligent systems, among others. This book is a collection of excellent papers that were updated after presentation at ICIUS2011. All papers that form the chapters of this book were reviewed and revised from the perspective of advanced relevant technologies in the field. The aim of this book is to stimulate interactions among researchers active in the areas pertinent to intelligent unmanned systems.

The robotic mechanism and its controller make a complete system. As the robotic mechanism is reconfigured, the control system has to be adapted accordingly. The need for the reconfiguration usually arises from the changing functional requirements. This book will focus on the adaptive control of robotic manipulators to address the changed conditions. The aim of the book is to summarise and introduce the state-of-the-art technologies in the field of adaptive control of robotic manipulators in order to improve the methodologies on the adaptive control of robotic manipulators. Advances made in the past decades are described in the book, including adaptive control theories and design, and application of adaptive control to robotic manipulators.