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.

This book is the second volume on Cooperative Robots and Sensor Networks. The primary objective of this book is to provide an up-to-date reference for cutting-edge studies and research trends related to mobile robots and wireless sensor networks, and in particular for the coupling between them. Indeed, mobile robots and wireless sensor networks have enabled great potentials and a large space for ubiquitous and pervasive applications. Robotics and wireless sensor networks have mostly been considered as separate research fields and little work has investigated the marriage between these two technologies. However, these two technologies share several features, enable common cyber-physical applications and provide complementary support to each other. The book consists of ten chapters, organized into four parts. The first part of the book presents three chapters related to localization of mobile robots using wireless sensor networks. Two chapters presented new solutions based Extended Kalman Filter and Particle Filter for localizing the robots using range measurements with the sensor network. The third chapter presents a survey on mobility-assisted localization techniques in wireless sensor networks. The second part of the book deals with cooperative robots and sensor networks applications. One chapter presents a comprehensive overview of major applications coupling between robots and sensor networks and provides real-world examples of their cooperation. Two other chapters present applications for underwater robots and sensor networks.

Cognitive Science is a discipline that brings together research in natural and artificial systems and this is clearly reflected in the diverse contributions to From Animals to Robots and Back. In tribute to Aaron Sloman and his pioneering work in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, the editors have collected a unique collection of cross-disciplinary papers that include work on: ·        intelligent robotics; ·        philosophy of cognitive science; ·        emotional research ·        computational vision; ·        comparative psychology; and ·        human-computer interaction. Key themes such as the importance of taking an architectural view in approaching cognition, run through the text. Drawing on the expertize of leading international researchers, contemporary debates in the study of natural and artificial cognition are addressed from complementary and contrasting perspectives with key issues being outlined at various levels of abstraction. From Animals to Robots and Back, will give readers with backgrounds in the study of both natural and artificial cognition an important window on the state of the art in cognitive systems research.

The topics addressed in this book cover the whole range of kinematic analysis, synthesis and design and consider robotic systems possessing serial, parallel and cable driven mechanisms. The robotic systems range from being less than fully mobile to kinematically redundant to over constrained. The fifty-six contributions report the latest results in robot kinematics with emphasis on emerging areas such as design and control of humanoids or humanoid subsystems. The book is of interest to researchers wanting to bring their knowledge up to date regarding modern topics in one of the basic disciplines in robotics, which relates to the essential property of robots, the motion of mechanisms.

This book offers a comprehensive, timely snapshot of current research, technologies and applications of soft robotics. The different chapters, written by international experts across multiple fields of soft robotics, cover innovative systems and technologies for soft robot legged locomotion, soft robot manipulation, underwater soft robotics, biomimetic soft robotic platforms, plant-inspired soft robots, flying soft robots, soft robotics in surgery, as well as methods for their modeling and control. Based on the results of the second edition of the Soft Robotics Week, held on April 25 - 30, 2016, in Livorno, Italy, the book reports on the major research lines and novel technologies presented and discussed during the event.

This book is for researchers, engineers, and students who are willing to understand how humanoid robots move and be controlled. The book starts with an overview of the humanoid robotics research history and state of the art. Then it explains the required mathematics and physics such as kinematics of multi-body system, Zero-Moment Point (ZMP) and its relationship with body motion. Biped walking control is discussed in depth, since it is one of the main interests of humanoid robotics. Various topics of the whole body motion generation are also discussed. Finally multi-body dynamics is presented to simulate the complete dynamic behavior of a humanoid robot. Throughout the book, Matlab codes are shown to test the algorithms and to help the reader´s understanding.

Legged robots are a promising locomotion system, capable of performing tasks that conventional vehicles cannot. Even more exciting is the fact that this is a rapidly developing field of study for researchers from a variety of disciplines. However, only a few books have been published on the subject of multi-legged robots. The main objective of this book is to describe some of the major control issues concerning walking robots that the authors have faced over the past 10 years. A second objective is to focus especially on very large hydraulically driven hexapod robot locomotion weighing more than 2,000 kg, making this the first specialized book on this topic. The 10 chapters of the book touch on diverse relevant topics such as design aspects, implementation issues, modeling for control, navigation and control, force and impedance control-based walking, fully autonomous walking, walking and working tasks of hexapod robots, and the future of walking robots. The construction machines of the future will very likely resemble hydraulically driven hexapod robots like the ones described in this book – no longer science fiction but now a reality.

This book focuses on advanced optical finishing techniques and design for high-performance manufacturing systems. It provides numerous detailed examples of how advanced automation techniques have been applied to optical fabrication processes. The simulations, removal rate and accurate experimental results offer useful resources for engineering practice. Researchers, engineers and graduate students working in optical engineering and precision manufacture engineering will benefit from this book.

This volume presents the outcome of the second forum to cable-driven parallel robots, bringing the cable robot community together. It shows the new ideas of the active researchers developing cable-driven robots. The book presents the state of the art, including both summarizing contributions as well as latest research and future options. The book cover all topics which are essential for cable-driven robots: Classification Kinematics, Workspace and Singularity Analysis Statics and Dynamics Cable Modeling Control and Calibration Design Methodology Hardware Development Experimental Evaluation Prototypes, Application Reports and new Application concepts.

Distributed robotics is a rapidly growing and maturing interdisciplinary research area lying at the intersection of computer science, network science, control theory, and electrical and mechanical engineering. The goal of the Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS) is to exchange and stimulate research ideas to realize advanced distributed robotic systems. This volume of proceedings includes 31 original contributions presented at the 2012 International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS 2012) held in November 2012 at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD USA. The selected papers in this volume are authored by leading researchers from Asia, Europa, and the Americas, 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 five parts, representative of critical long-term and emerging research thrusts in the multi-robot community: Coordination for Perception, Coverage, and Tracking; Task Allocation and Coordination Strategies; Modular Robots and Novel Mechanisms and Sensors; Formation Control and Planning for Robot Teams; and Learning, Adaptation, and Cognition for Robot Teams.

This updated edition of the industry standard reference on power system frequency control provides practical, systematic and flexible algorithms for regulating load frequency, offering new solutions to the technical challenges introduced by the escalating role of distributed generation and renewable energy sources in smart electric grids. The author emphasizes the physical constraints and practical engineering issues related to frequency in a deregulated environment, while fostering a conceptual understanding of frequency regulation and robust control techniques. The resulting control strategies bridge the gap between advantageous robust controls and traditional power system design, and are supplemented by real-time simulations. The impacts of low inertia and damping effect on system frequency in the presence of increased distributed and renewable penetration are given particular consideration, as the bulk synchronous machines of conventional frequency control are rendered ineffective in emerging grid environments where distributed/variable units with little or no rotating mass become dominant. Frequency stability and control issues relevant to the exciting new field of microgrids are also undertaken in this new edition. As frequency control becomes increasingly significant in the design of ever-more complex power systems, this expert guide ensures engineers are prepared to deploy smart grids with optimal functionality.

This collection of proceedings from the International Conference on Systems Engineering, Las Vegas, 2014 is orientated toward systems engineering, including topics like aero-space, power systems, industrial automation and robotics, systems theory, control theory, artificial intelligence, signal processing, decision support, pattern recognition and machine learning, information and communication technologies, image processing, and computer vision as well as its applications. The volume’s main focus is on models, algorithms, and software tools that facilitate efficient and convenient utilization of modern achievements in systems engineering.

This monograph provides readers with tools for the analysis, and control of systems with fewer control inputs than degrees of freedom to be controlled, i.e., underactuated systems. The text deals with the consequences of a lack of a general theory that would allow methodical treatment of such systems and the ad hoc approach to control design that often results, imposing a level of organization whenever the latter is lacking. The authors take as their starting point the construction of a graphical characterization or control flow diagram reflecting the transmission of generalized forces through the degrees of freedom. Underactuated systems are classified according to the three main structures by which this is found to happen-chain, tree, and isolated vertex-and control design procedures proposed. The procedure is applied to several well-known examples of underactuated systems: acrobot; pendubot; Tora system; ball and beam; inertia wheel; and robotic arm with elastic joint. (R)/Simulink (R) simulations that demonstrate the effectiveness of the methods detailed.Readers interested in aircraft, vehicle control or various forms of walking robot will be able to learn from Underactuated Mechanical Systems how to estimate the degree of complexity required in the control design of several classes of underactuated systems and proceed on to further generate more systematic control laws according to its methods of analysis.

An autonomous sailboat robot is a boat that only uses the wind on its sail as the propelling force, without remote control or human assistance to achieve its mission. Robotic sailing offers the potential of long range and long term autonomous wind propelled, solar or wave-powered carbon neutral devices. Robotic sailing devices could contribute to monitoring of environmental, ecological, meteorological, hydrographic and oceanographic data. These devices can also be used in traffic monitoring, border surveillance, security, assistance and rescue. The dependency on changing winds and sea conditions presents a considerable challenge for short and long term route and stability planning, collision avoidance and boat control. Building a robust and seaworthy sailing robot presents a truly complex and multi-disciplinary challenge for boat designers, naval architects, systems/electrical engineers and computer scientists. Over the last decade, several events such as Sailbot, World Robotic Sailing Championship and the International Robotic Sailing Conference (WRSC/IRSC) and Microtransat have sparked an explosion in the number of groups working on autonomous sailing robots. Many of the challenges in building truly autonomous sailing robots still remain unsolved. These proceedings present the work of researchers on current and future challenges in autonomous sailboat development, presented at the WRSC/IRSC 2014 in Galway, Ireland, 8th – 12th September 2014.

This book describes how the principle of self-sufficiency can be applied to a reconfigurable modular robotic organism. It shows the design considerations for a novel REPLICATOR robotic platform, both hardware and software, featuring the behavioral characteristics of social insect colonies. Following a comprehensive overview of some of the bio-inspired techniques already available, and of the state-of-the-art in re-configurable modular robotic systems, the book presents a novel power management system with fault-tolerant energy sharing, as well as its implementation in the REPLICATOR robotic modules. In addition, the book discusses, for the first time, the concept of “artificial energy homeostasis� in the context of a modular robotic organism, and shows its verification on a custom-designed simulation framework in different dynamic power distribution and fault tolerance scenarios. This book offers an ideal reference guide for both hardware engineers and software developers involved in the design and implementation of autonomous robotic systems.

The integrated and advanced science research topic man-machine-environment system engineering (MMESE) was first established in China by Professor Shengzhao Long in 1981, with direct support from one of the greatest modern Chinese scientists, Xuesen Qian. In a letter to Shengzhao Long from October 22nd, 1993, Xuesen Qian wrote: “You have created a very important modern science and technology in China!� MMESE primarily focuses on the relationship between man, machines and the environment, studying the optimum combination of man-machine-environment systems. In this system, “man� refers to people in the workplace (e.g. operators, decision-makers); “ machine� is the general name for any object controlled by man (including tools, machinery, computers, systems and technologies), and “environment� describes the specific working conditions under which man and machine interact (e.g. temperature, noise, vibration, hazardous gases etc.). The three goals of optimization of man-machine-environment systems are to ensure safety, efficiency and economy. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Man-Machine-Environment System Engineering are an academic showcase of the best papers selected from more than 400 submissions, introducing readers to the top research topics and the latest developmental trends in the theory and application of MMESE. These proceedings are interdisciplinary studies on the concepts and methods of physiology, psychology, system engineering, computer science, environment science, management, education, and other related disciplines. Researchers and professionals working in these interdisciplinary fields and researchers on MMESE related topics will benefit from these proceedings.

This book presents bond graph model-based fault detection with a focus on hybrid system models. The book addresses model design, simulation, control and model-based fault diagnosis of multidisciplinary engineering systems. The text beings with a brief survey of the state-of-the-art, then focuses on hybrid systems. The author then uses different bond graph approaches throughout the text and provides case studies.

This book presents the singular configurations associated with a robot mechanism, together with robust methods for their computation, interpretation, and avoidance path planning. Having such methods is essential as singularities generally pose problems to the normal operation of a robot, but also determine the workspaces and motion impediments of its underlying mechanical structure. A distinctive feature of this volume is that the methods are applicable to nonredundant mechanisms of general architecture, defined by planar or spatial kinematic chains interconnected in an arbitrary way. Moreover, singularities are interpreted as silhouettes of the configuration space when seen from the input or output spaces. This leads to a powerful image that explains the consequences of traversing singular configurations, and all the rich information that can be extracted from them. The problems are solved by means of effective branch-and-prune and numerical continuation methods that are of independent interest in themselves. The theory can be put into practice as well: a companion web page gives open access to implementations of the algorithms and the corresponding input files. Using them, the reader can gain hands-on experience on the topic, or analyse new mechanisms beyond those examined in the text. Overall, the book contributes new tools for robot design, and constitutes a single reference source of knowledge that is otherwise dispersed in the literature.

The field of robotic vision has advanced dramatically recently with the development of new range sensors. Tremendous progress has been made resulting in significant impact on areas such as robotic navigation, scene/environment understanding, and visual learning. This edited book provides a solid and diversified reference source for some of the most recent important advancements in the field of robotic vision. The book starts with articles that describe new techniques to understand scenes from 2D/3D data such as estimation of planar structures, recognition of multiple objects in the scene using different kinds of features as well as their spatial and semantic relationships, generation of 3D object models, approach to recognize partially occluded objects, etc. Novel techniques are introduced to improve 3D perception accuracy with other sensors such as a gyroscope, positioning accuracy with a visual servoing based alignment strategy for microassembly, and increasing object recognition reliability using related manipulation motion models. For autonomous robot navigation, different vision-based localization and tracking strategies and algorithms are discussed. New approaches using probabilistic analysis for robot navigation, online learning of vision-based robot control, and 3D motion estimation via intensity differences from a monocular camera are described. This collection will be beneficial to graduate students, researchers, and professionals working in the area of robotic vision.  

The present book includes a set of selected papers from the tenth “International Conference on Informatics in Control Automation and Robotics� (ICINCO 2013), held in Reykjavík, Iceland, from 29 to 31 July 2013. The conference was organized in four simultaneous tracks: “Intelligent Control Systems and Optimization�, “Robotics and Automation�, “Signal Processing, Sensors, Systems Modeling and Control� and “Industrial Engineering, Production and Management�. The book is based on the same structure. ICINCO 2013 received 255 paper submissions from 50 countries, in all continents. After a double blind paper review performed by the Program Committee only 30% were published and presented orally. A further refinement was made after the conference, based also on the assessment of presentation quality, so that this book includes the extended and revised versions of the very best papers of ICINCO 2013.

This book presents cutting-edge emerging technologies and approaches in the areas of service-oriented architectures, intelligent devices and cloud-based cyber-physical systems. It provides a clear view on their applicability to the management and automation of manufacturing and process industries. It offers a holistic view of future industrial cyber-physical systems and their industrial usage and also depicts technologies and architectures as well as a migration approach and engineering tools based on these. By providing a careful balance between the theory and the practical aspects, this book has been authored by several experts from academia and industry, thereby offering a valuable understanding of the vision, the domain, the processes and the results of the research. It has several illustrations and tables to clearly exemplify the concepts and results examined in the text and these are supported by four real-life case-studies. We are witnessing rapid advances in the industrial automation, mainly driven by business needs towards agility and supported by new disruptive advances both on the software and hardware side, as well as the cross-fertilization of concepts and the amalgamation of information and communication technology-driven approaches in traditional industrial automation and control systems. This book is intended for technology managers, application designers, solution developers, engineers working in industry, as well as researchers, undergraduate and graduate students of industrial automation, industrial informatics and production engineering.

Vision-based control of wheeled mobile robots is an interesting field of research from a scientific and even social point of view due to its potential applicability. This book presents a formal treatment of some aspects of control theory applied to the problem of vision-based pose regulation of wheeled mobile robots. In this problem, the robot has to reach a desired position and orientation, which are specified by a target image. It is faced in such a way that vision and control are unified to achieve stability of the closed loop, a large region of convergence, without local minima and good robustness against parametric uncertainty. Three different control schemes that rely on monocular vision as unique sensor are presented and evaluated experimentally. A common benefit of these approaches is that they are valid for imaging systems obeying approximately a central projection model, e.g., conventional cameras, catadioptric systems and some fisheye cameras. Thus, the presented control schemes are generic approaches. A minimum set of visual measurements, integrated in adequate task functions, are taken from a geometric constraint imposed between corresponding image features. Particularly, the epipolar geometry and the trifocal tensor are exploited since they can be used for generic scenes. A detailed experimental evaluation is presented for each control scheme.

This book is dedicated to applied computational intelligence and soft computing techniques with special reference to decision support in Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), where the physical as well as the communication segment of the networked entities interact with each other. The joint dynamics of such systems result in a complex combination of computers, software, networks and physical processes all combined to establish a process flow at system level. This volume provides the audience with an in-depth vision about how to ensure dependability, safety, security and efficiency in real time by making use of computational intelligence in various CPS applications ranging from the nano-world to large scale wide area systems of systems. Key application areas include healthcare, transportation, energy, process control and robotics where intelligent decision support has key significance in establishing dynamic, ever-changing and high confidence future technologies. A recommended text for graduate students and researchers working on the applications of computational intelligence methods in CPS.

Soft computing, intelligent robotics and control are in the core interest of contemporary engineering. Essential characteristics of soft computing methods are the ability to handle vague information, to apply human-like reasoning, their learning capability and ease of application. Soft computing techniques are widely applied in the control of dynamic systems, including mobile robots. The present volume is a collection of 20 chapters written by respectable experts of the fields, addressing various theoretical and practical aspects in soft computing, intelligent robotics and control. The first part of the book concerns with issues of intelligent robotics, including robust xed point transformation design, experimental verification of the input-output feedback linearization of differentially driven mobile robot and applying kinematic synthesis to micro electro-mechanical systems design. The second part of the book is devoted to fundamental aspects of soft computing. This includes practical aspects of fuzzy rule interpolation, subjective weights based meta learning in multi criteria decision making, swarm-based heuristics for an area exploration and knowledge driven adaptive product representations. The last part addresses different problems, issues and methods of applied mathematics. This includes perturbation estimates for invariant subspaces of Hessenberg matrices, uncertainty and nonlinearity modelling by probabilistic metric spaces and comparison and visualization of the DNA of six primates.

The biennial CONTROLO conferences are the main events promoted by The CONTROLO 2016 - 12th Portuguese Conference on Automatic Control, Guimaraes, Portugal, September 14th to 16th, was organized by Algoritmi, School of Engineering, University of Minho, in partnership with INESC TEC, and promoted by the Portuguese Association for Automatic Control - APCA, national member organization of the International Federation of Automatic Control - IFAC. The seventy-five papers published in this volume cover a wide range of topics. Thirty-one of them, of a more theoretical nature, are distributed among the first five parts: Control Theory; Optimal and Predictive Control; Fuzzy, Neural and Genetic Control; Modeling and Identification; Sensing and Estimation. The papers go from cutting-edge theoretical research to innovative control applications and show expressively how Automatic Control can be used to increase the well being of people.