Download or read book Autonomous Robots written by George A. Bekey and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005-05-20 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the science and practice of autonomous robots that reviews over 300 current systems and examines the underlying technology. Autonomous robots are intelligent machines capable of performing tasks in the world by themselves, without explicit human control. Examples range from autonomous helicopters to Roomba, the robot vacuum cleaner. In this book, George Bekey offers an introduction to the science and practice of autonomous robots that can be used both in the classroom and as a reference for industry professionals. He surveys the hardware implementations of more than 300 current systems, reviews some of their application areas, and examines the underlying technology, including control, architectures, learning, manipulation, grasping, navigation, and mapping. Living systems can be considered the prototypes of autonomous systems, and Bekey explores the biological inspiration that forms the basis of many recent developments in robotics. He also discusses robot control issues and the design of control architectures. After an overview of the field that introduces some of its fundamental concepts, the book presents background material on hardware, control (from both biological and engineering perspectives), software architecture, and robot intelligence. It then examines a broad range of implementations and applications, including locomotion (wheeled, legged, flying, swimming, and crawling robots), manipulation (both arms and hands), localization, navigation, and mapping. The many case studies and specific applications include robots built for research, industry, and the military, among them underwater robotic vehicles, walking machines with four, six, and eight legs, and the famous humanoid robots Cog, Kismet, ASIMO, and QRIO. The book concludes with reflections on the future of robotics—the potential benefits as well as the possible dangers that may arise from large numbers of increasingly intelligent and autonomous robots.

Download or read book Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots second edition written by Roland Siegwart and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-02-18 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second edition of a comprehensive introduction to all aspects of mobile robotics, from algorithms to mechanisms. Mobile robots range from the Mars Pathfinder mission's teleoperated Sojourner to the cleaning robots in the Paris Metro. This text offers students and other interested readers an introduction to the fundamentals of mobile robotics, spanning the mechanical, motor, sensory, perceptual, and cognitive layers the field comprises. The text focuses on mobility itself, offering an overview of the mechanisms that allow a mobile robot to move through a real world environment to perform its tasks, including locomotion, sensing, localization, and motion planning. It synthesizes material from such fields as kinematics, control theory, signal analysis, computer vision, information theory, artificial intelligence, and probability theory. The book presents the techniques and technology that enable mobility in a series of interacting modules. Each chapter treats a different aspect of mobility, as the book moves from low-level to high-level details. It covers all aspects of mobile robotics, including software and hardware design considerations, related technologies, and algorithmic techniques. This second edition has been revised and updated throughout, with 130 pages of new material on such topics as locomotion, perception, localization, and planning and navigation. Problem sets have been added at the end of each chapter. Bringing together all aspects of mobile robotics into one volume, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots can serve as a textbook or a working tool for beginning practitioners. Curriculum developed by Dr. Robert King, Colorado School of Mines, and Dr. James Conrad, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, to accompany the National Instruments LabVIEW Robotics Starter Kit, are available. Included are 13 (6 by Dr. King and 7 by Dr. Conrad) laboratory exercises for using the LabVIEW Robotics Starter Kit to teach mobile robotics concepts.

Download or read book Autonomous Agents written by George A. Bekey and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An agent is a system capable of perceiving the environment, reasoning with the percepts and then acting upon the world. Agents can be purely software systems, in which case their percepts and output `actions' are encoded binary strings. However, agents can also be realized in hardware, and then they are robots. The Artificial Intelligence community frequently views robots as embodied intelligent agents. The First International Conference on Autonomous Agents was held in Santa Monica, California, in February 1997. This conference brought together researchers from around the world with interests in agents, whether implemented purely in software or in hardware. The conference featured such topics as intelligent software agents, agents in virtual environments, agents in the entertainment industry, and robotic agents. Papers on robotic agents were selected for this volume. Autonomous Agents will be of interest to researchers and students in the area of artificial intelligence and robotics.

Download or read book Plan Based Control of Robotic Agents written by Michael Beetz and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-07-01 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robotic agents, such as autonomous office couriers or robot tourguides, must be both reliable and efficient. Thus, they have to flexibly interleave their tasks, exploit opportunities, quickly plan their course of action, and, if necessary, revise their intended activities. This book makes three major contributions to improving the capabilities of robotic agents: - first, a plan representation method is introduced which allows for specifying flexible and reliable behavior - second, probabilistic hybrid action models are presented as a realistic causal model for predicting the behavior generated by modern concurrent percept-driven robot plans - third, the system XFRMLEARN capable of learning structured symbolic navigation plans is described in detail.

Download or read book Autonomous Robots and Agents written by Gourab Sen Gupta and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-08-14 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book collects the extended versions of the best papers presented at the 3rd International Conference on Autonomous Robots and Agents, ICARA 2006, held at Palmerston North, New Zealand, December, 2006. It covers theoretical and methodological aspects of incorporating intelligence in autonomous robots and agents, detailing the collaborative efforts and methods needed to overcome challenges faced in the real world and accomplish complex tasks.

Download or read book The Robotics Primer written by Maja J. Mataric and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007-08-17 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A broadly accessible introduction to robotics that spans the most basic concepts and the most novel applications; for students, teachers, and hobbyists. The Robotics Primer offers a broadly accessible introduction to robotics for students at pre-university and university levels, robot hobbyists, and anyone interested in this burgeoning field. The text takes the reader from the most basic concepts (including perception and movement) to the most novel and sophisticated applications and topics (humanoids, shape-shifting robots, space robotics), with an emphasis on what it takes to create autonomous intelligent robot behavior. The core concepts of robotics are carried through from fundamental definitions to more complex explanations, all presented in an engaging, conversational style that will appeal to readers of different backgrounds. The Robotics Primer covers such topics as the definition of robotics, the history of robotics (“Where do Robots Come From?”), robot components, locomotion, manipulation, sensors, control, control architectures, representation, behavior (“Making Your Robot Behave”), navigation, group robotics, learning, and the future of robotics (and its ethical implications). To encourage further engagement, experimentation, and course and lesson design, The Robotics Primer is accompanied by a free robot programming exercise workbook that implements many of the ideas on the book on iRobot platforms. The Robotics Primer is unique as a principled, pedagogical treatment of the topic that is accessible to a broad audience; the only prerequisites are curiosity and attention. It can be used effectively in an educational setting or more informally for self-instruction. The Robotics Primer is a springboard for readers of all backgrounds—including students taking robotics as an elective outside the major, graduate students preparing to specialize in robotics, and K-12 teachers who bring robotics into their classrooms.

Download or read book Developmental Robotics written by Angelo Cangelosi and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-01-09 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive overview of an interdisciplinary approach to robotics that takes direct inspiration from the developmental and learning phenomena observed in children's cognitive development. Developmental robotics is a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to robotics that is directly inspired by the developmental principles and mechanisms observed in children's cognitive development. It builds on the idea that the robot, using a set of intrinsic developmental principles regulating the real-time interaction of its body, brain, and environment, can autonomously acquire an increasingly complex set of sensorimotor and mental capabilities. This volume, drawing on insights from psychology, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, and robotics, offers the first comprehensive overview of a rapidly growing field. After providing some essential background information on robotics and developmental psychology, the book looks in detail at how developmental robotics models and experiments have attempted to realize a range of behavioral and cognitive capabilities. The examples in these chapters were chosen because of their direct correspondence with specific issues in child psychology research; each chapter begins with a concise and accessible overview of relevant empirical and theoretical findings in developmental psychology. The chapters cover intrinsic motivation and curiosity; motor development, examining both manipulation and locomotion; perceptual development, including face recognition and perception of space; social learning, emphasizing such phenomena as joint attention and cooperation; language, from phonetic babbling to syntactic processing; and abstract knowledge, including models of number learning and reasoning strategies. Boxed text offers technical and methodological details for both psychology and robotics experiments.

Download or read book Designing Autonomous Agents written by Pattie Maes and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Designing Autonomous Agents provides a summary and overview of the radically different architectures that have been developed over the past few years for organizing robots. These architectures have led to major breakthroughs that promise to revolutionize the study of autonomous agents and perhaps artificial intelligence in general. The new architectures emphasize more direct coupling of sensing to action, distributedness and decentralization, dynamic interaction with the environment, and intrinsic mechanisms to cope with limited resources and incomplete knowledge. The research discussed here encompasses such important ideas as emergent functionality, task-level decomposition, and reasoning methods such as analogical representations and visual operations that make the task of perception more realistic. Contents A Biological Perspective on Autonomous Agent Design, Randall D. Beer, Hillel J. Chiel, Leon S. Sterling * Elephants Don't Play Chess, Rodney A. Brooks * What Are Plans For? Philip E. Agre and David Chapman * Action and Planning in Embedded Agents, Leslie Pack Kaelbling and Stanley J. Rosenschein * Situated Agents Can Have Goals, Pattie Maes * Exploiting Analogical Representations, Luc Steels * Internalized Plans: A Representation for Action Resources, David W. Payton * Integrating Behavioral, Perceptual, and World Knowledge in Reactive Navigation, Ronald C. Arkin * Symbol Grounding via a Hybrid Architecture in an Autonomous Assembly System, Chris Malcolm and Tim Smithers * Animal Behavior as a Paradigm for Developing Robot Autonomy, Tracy L. Anderson and Max Donath

Download or read book Behavior based Robotics written by Ronald C. Arkin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foreword by Michael Arbib This introduction to the principles, design, and practice of intelligent behavior-based autonomous robotic systems is the first true survey of this robotics field. The author presents the tools and techniques central to the development of this class of systems in a clear and thorough manner. Following a discussion of the relevant biological and psychological models of behavior, he covers the use of knowledge and learning in autonomous robots, behavior-based and hybrid robot architectures, modular perception, robot colonies, and future trends in robot intelligence. The text throughout refers to actual implemented robots and includes many pictures and descriptions of hardware, making it clear that these are not abstract simulations, but real machines capable of perception, cognition, and action.

Download or read book Introduction to AI Robotics second edition written by Robin R. Murphy and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive survey of artificial intelligence algorithms and programming organization for robot systems, combining theoretical rigor and practical applications. This textbook offers a comprehensive survey of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and programming organization for robot systems. Readers who master the topics covered will be able to design and evaluate an artificially intelligent robot for applications involving sensing, acting, planning, and learning. A background in AI is not required; the book introduces key AI topics from all AI subdisciplines throughout the book and explains how they contribute to autonomous capabilities. This second edition is a major expansion and reorganization of the first edition, reflecting the dramatic advances made in AI over the past fifteen years. An introductory overview provides a framework for thinking about AI for robotics, distinguishing between the fundamentally different design paradigms of automation and autonomy. The book then discusses the reactive functionality of sensing and acting in AI robotics; introduces the deliberative functions most often associated with intelligence and the capability of autonomous initiative; surveys multi-robot systems and (in a new chapter) human-robot interaction; and offers a “metaview” of how to design and evaluate autonomous systems and the ethical considerations in doing so. New material covers locomotion, simultaneous localization and mapping, human-robot interaction, machine learning, and ethics. Each chapter includes exercises, and many chapters provide case studies. Endnotes point to additional reading, highlight advanced topics, and offer robot trivia.

Download or read book Autonomous Robots and Agents written by Gourab Sen Gupta and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-09-02 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book collects the extended versions of the best papers presented at the 3rd International Conference on Autonomous Robots and Agents, ICARA 2006, held at Palmerston North, New Zealand, December, 2006. It covers theoretical and methodological aspects of incorporating intelligence in autonomous robots and agents, detailing the collaborative efforts and methods needed to overcome challenges faced in the real world and accomplish complex tasks.

Download or read book Evolutionary Robotics written by Stefano Nolfi and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overview of the basic concepts and methodologies of evolutionary robotics, which views robots as autonomous artificial organisms that develop their own skills in close interaction with the environment and without human intervention.

Download or read book Robot Ethics written by Patrick Lin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prominent experts from science and the humanities explore issues in robot ethics that range from sex to war. Robots today serve in many roles, from entertainer to educator to executioner. As robotics technology advances, ethical concerns become more pressing: Should robots be programmed to follow a code of ethics, if this is even possible? Are there risks in forming emotional bonds with robots? How might society—and ethics—change with robotics? This volume is the first book to bring together prominent scholars and experts from both science and the humanities to explore these and other questions in this emerging field. Starting with an overview of the issues and relevant ethical theories, the topics flow naturally from the possibility of programming robot ethics to the ethical use of military robots in war to legal and policy questions, including liability and privacy concerns. The contributors then turn to human-robot emotional relationships, examining the ethical implications of robots as sexual partners, caregivers, and servants. Finally, they explore the possibility that robots, whether biological-computational hybrids or pure machines, should be given rights or moral consideration. Ethics is often slow to catch up with technological developments. This authoritative and accessible volume fills a gap in both scholarly literature and policy discussion, offering an impressive collection of expert analyses of the most crucial topics in this increasingly important field.

Download or read book Advances in Plan Based Control of Robotic Agents written by Michael Beetz and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-08-02 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, autonomous robots, including Xavier, Martha [1], Rhino [2,3], Minerva,and Remote Agent, have shown impressive performance in long-term demonstrations. In NASA’s Deep Space program, for example, an - tonomous spacecraft controller, called the Remote Agent [5], has autonomously performed a scienti?c experiment in space. At Carnegie Mellon University, Xavier [6], another autonomous mobile robot, navigated through an o?ce - vironment for more than a year, allowing people to issue navigation commands and monitor their execution via the Internet. In 1998, Minerva [7] acted for 13 days as a museum tourguide in the Smithsonian Museum, and led several thousand people through an exhibition. These autonomous robots have in common that they rely on plan-based c- trol in order to achieve better problem-solving competence. In the plan-based approach, robots generate control actions by maintaining and executing a plan that is e?ective and has a high expected utility with respect to the robots’ c- rent goals and beliefs. Plans are robot control programs that a robot can not only execute but also reason about and manipulate [4]. Thus, a plan-based c- troller is able to manage and adapt the robot’s intended course of action — the plan — while executing it and can thereby better achieve complex and changing tasks.

Download or read book Mobile Microrobotics written by Metin Sitti and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-06-16 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first textbook on micron-scale mobile robotics, introducing the fundamentals of design, analysis, fabrication, and control, and drawing on case studies of existing approaches. Progress in micro- and nano-scale science and technology has created a demand for new microsystems for high-impact applications in healthcare, biotechnology, manufacturing, and mobile sensor networks. The new robotics field of microrobotics has emerged to extend our interactions and explorations to sub-millimeter scales. This is the first textbook on micron-scale mobile robotics, introducing the fundamentals of design, analysis, fabrication, and control, and drawing on case studies of existing approaches. The book covers the scaling laws that can be used to determine the dominant forces and effects at the micron scale; models forces acting on microrobots, including surface forces, friction, and viscous drag; and describes such possible microfabrication techniques as photo-lithography, bulk micromachining, and deep reactive ion etching. It presents on-board and remote sensing methods, noting that remote sensors are currently more feasible; studies possible on-board microactuators; discusses self-propulsion methods that use self-generated local gradients and fields or biological cells in liquid environments; and describes remote microrobot actuation methods for use in limited spaces such as inside the human body. It covers possible on-board powering methods, indispensable in future medical and other applications; locomotion methods for robots on surfaces, in liquids, in air, and on fluid-air interfaces; and the challenges of microrobot localization and control, in particular multi-robot control methods for magnetic microrobots. Finally, the book addresses current and future applications, including noninvasive medical diagnosis and treatment, environmental remediation, and scientific tools.

Download or read book Robot Shaping written by Marco Dorigo and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: foreword by Lashon Booker To program an autonomous robot to act reliably in a dynamic environment is a complex task. The dynamics of the environment are unpredictable, and the robots' sensors provide noisy input. A learning autonomous robot, one that can acquire knowledge through interaction with its environment and then adapt its behavior, greatly simplifies the designer's work. A learning robot need not be given all of the details of its environment, and its sensors and actuators need not be finely tuned. Robot Shaping is about designing and building learning autonomous robots. The term "shaping" comes from experimental psychology, where it describes the incremental training of animals. The authors propose a new engineering discipline, "behavior engineering," to provide the methodologies and tools for creating autonomous robots. Their techniques are based on classifier systems, a reinforcement learning architecture originated by John Holland, to which they have added several new ideas, such as "mutespec," classifier system "energy,"and dynamic population size. In the book they present Behavior Analysis and Training (BAT) as an example of a behavior engineering methodology.

Download or read book Probabilistic Robotics written by Sebastian Thrun and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005-08-19 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the techniques and algorithms of the newest field in robotics. Probabilistic robotics is a new and growing area in robotics, concerned with perception and control in the face of uncertainty. Building on the field of mathematical statistics, probabilistic robotics endows robots with a new level of robustness in real-world situations. This book introduces the reader to a wealth of techniques and algorithms in the field. All algorithms are based on a single overarching mathematical foundation. Each chapter provides example implementations in pseudo code, detailed mathematical derivations, discussions from a practitioner's perspective, and extensive lists of exercises and class projects. The book's Web site, www.probabilistic-robotics.org, has additional material. The book is relevant for anyone involved in robotic software development and scientific research. It will also be of interest to applied statisticians and engineers dealing with real-world sensor data.