Download or read book Interleaving Planning and Execution for Autonomous Robots written by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interleaving Planning and Execution for Autonomous Robots develops a formal representation for interleaving planning and execution in the context of incomplete information. This work bridges the gap between theory and practice in robotics by presenting control architectures that are provably sound, complete and optimal, and then describing real-world implementations of these robot architectures. Dervish, winner of the 1994 AAAI National Robot Contest, is one of the robots featured. Interleaving Planning and Execution for Autonomous Robots is based on the author's PhD research, covering the same material taught in CS 224, the very popular Introduction to Robot Programming Laboratory taught at Stanford for four years by Professor Michael Genesereth and the author.

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 MICAI 2000 Advances in Artificial Intelligence written by Osvaldo Cairo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-12-30 with total page 763 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty years ago, A. Turing predicted that by 2000 we would have a machine that could pass the Turing test. Although this may not yet be true, AI has advanced signi?cantly in these 50 years, and at the dawn of the XXI century is still an activeandchallenging?eld.Thisyearisalsosigni?cantforAIinMexico,withthe merging of the two major AI conferences into the biennial Mexican International Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (MICAI) series. MICAI is the union of the Mexican National AI Conference (RNIA) and the International AI Symposium (ISAI), organized annually by the Mexican Society forAI(SMIA,since1984)andbytheMonterreyInstituteofTechnology(ITESM, since1988),respectively.The?rstMexicanInternationalConferenceonArti?cial Intelligence, MICAI 2000, took place April 11-14, 2000, in the city of Acapulco, Mexico.ThisconferenceseekstopromoteresearchinAI,andcooperationamong Mexican researchers and their peers worldwide. We welcome you all. Over 163 papers from 17 di?erent countries were submitted for consideration to MICAI 2000. After reviewing them thoroughly, MICAI’s program committee, referees, and program chair accepted 60 papers for the international track. This volume contains the written version of the papers and invited talks presented at MICAI. We would like to acknowledge the support of the American Association for Arti?cial Intelligence (AAAI), and the International Joint Conference on Art- cial Intelligence (IJCAI). We are specially grateful for the warm hospitality and generosity o?ered by the Acapulco Institute of Technology.

Download or read book Advances in Artificial Intelligence IBERAMIA 2002 written by Francisco J. Garijo and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2002-10-30 with total page 974 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Ibero-American Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IBERAMIA 2002, held in Seville, Spain, in November 2002. The 97 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 345 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge representation and reasoning, machine learning, uncertainty and fuzzy systems, genetic algorithms, neural nets, distributed artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems, natural language processing, intelligent tutoring systems, control and real time, robotics, and computer vision.

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 Cooperative Information Agents III written by Matthias Klusch and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1999-07-21 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Cooperative Information Systems, CIA'99, held in Uppsala, Sweden in July/August 1999. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 46 submissions. Also included are ten invited contributions by leading experts. The volume is divided in sections on information discovery and management on the Internet; information agents on the Internet-prototypes systems and applications; communication and collaboration, mobile information agents; rational information agents for electronic business; service mediation and negotiation; and adaptive personal assistance.

Download or read book Intelligent Techniques for Planning written by Ioannis Vlahavas and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Intelligent Techniques for Planning presents a number of modern approaches to the area of automated planning. These approaches combine methods from classical planning such as the construction of graphs and the use of domain-independent heuristics with techniques from other areas of artificial intelligence. This book discuses, in detail, a number of state-of-the-art planning systems that utilize constraint satisfaction techniques in order to deal with time and resources, machine learning in order to utilize experience drawn from past runs, methods from knowledge systems for more expressive representation of knowledge and ideas from other areas such as Intelligent Agents. Apart from the thorough analysis and implementation details, each chapter of the book also provides extensive background information about its subject and presents and comments on similar approaches done in the past.

Download or read book Robot Force Control written by Bruno Siciliano and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the fundamental requirements for the success of a robot task is the capability to handle interaction between manipulator and environment. The quantity that describes the state of interaction more effectively is the contact force at the manipulator's end effector. High values of contact force are generally undesirable since they may stress both the manipulator and the manipulated object; hence the need to seek for effective force control strategies. The book provides a theoretical and experimental treatment of robot interaction control. In the framework of model-based operational space control, stiffness control and impedance control are presented as the basic strategies for indirect force control; a key feature is the coverage of six-degree-of-freedom interaction tasks and manipulator kinematic redundancy. Then, direct force control strategies are presented which are obtained from motion control schemes suitably modified by the closure of an outer force regulation feedback loop. Finally, advanced force and position control strategies are presented which include passivity-based, adaptive and output feedback control schemes. Remarkably, all control schemes are experimentally tested on a setup consisting of a seven-joint industrial robot with open control architecture and force/torque sensor. The topic of robot force control is not treated in depth in robotics textbooks, in spite of its crucial importance for practical manipulation tasks. In the few books addressing this topic, the material is often limited to single-degree-of-freedom tasks. On the other hand, several results are available in the robotics literature but no dedicated monograph exists. The book is thus aimed at filling this gap by providing a theoretical and experimental treatment of robot force control.

Download or read book Engineering Approaches to Mechanical and Robotic Design for Minimally Invasive Surgery MIS written by Ali Faraz and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the past twenty years, the field of robotics has been finding many areas of applications ranging from space to underwater explo rations. One of these areas which is slowly gaining popularity among the users group is the notion of service robotics. This book is an in vestigation and exploration of engineering principles in the design and development of mechanisms and robotic devices that can be used in the field of surgery. Specifically the results of this book can be used for designing tools for class of Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS). Generally, Minimal Invasive Surgery (MIS), e. g. laparoscopic surgery, is performed by using long surgical tools, that are inserted through small incisions at the ports of entry to the body (e. g. abdominal wall) for reaching the surgical site. The main drawback of current designs of en doscopic tools is that they are not able to extend all the movements and sensory capabilities of the surgeon's hand to the surgical site. By im proving surgical procedures, training, and more practice, it is possible for surgeons to reduce completion time for each task and increase their level of skill. However, even in the best cases the level of performance of a surgeon in Minimally Invasive Surgery is still a fraction of the con ventional surgery. Any dramatically improvement is usually driven by introduction of new tools or systems that in turn bring totally new pro cedures and set of skills.

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.

Download or read book Intelligent Unmanned Ground Vehicles written by Martial H. Hebert and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intelligent Unmanned Ground Vehicles describes the technology developed and the results obtained by the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute in the course of the DARPA Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) project. The goal of this work was to equip off-road vehicles with computer-controlled, unmanned driving capabilities. The book describes contributions in the area of mobility for UGVs including: tools for assembling complex autonomous mobility systems; on-road and off-road navigation; sensing techniques; and route planning algorithms. In addition to basic mobility technology, the book covers a number of integrated systems demonstrated in the field in realistic scenarios. The approaches presented in this book can be applied to a wide range of mobile robotics applications, from automated passenger cars to planetary exploration, and construction and agricultural machines. Intelligent Unmanned Ground Vehicles shows the progress that was achieved during this program, from brittle specially-built robots operating under highly constrained conditions, to groups of modified commercial vehicles operating in tough environments. One measure of progress is how much of this technology is being used in other applications. For example, much of the work in road-following, architectures and obstacle detection has been the basis for the Automated Highway Systems (AHS) prototypes currently under development. AHS will lead to commercial prototypes within a few years. The cross-country technology is also being used in the development of planetary rovers with a projected launch date within a few years. The architectural tools built under this program have been used in numerous applications, from an automated harvester to an autonomous excavator. The results reported in this work provide tools for further research development leading to practical, reliable and economical mobile robots.

Download or read book Intelligent Automation and Computer Engineering written by Oscar Castillo and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-07-17 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A large international conference in Intelligent Automation and Computer Engineering was held in Hong Kong, March 18-20, 2009, under the auspices of the International MultiConference of Engineers and Computer Scientists (IMECS 2009). The IMECS is organized by the International Association of Engineers (IAENG). Intelligent Automation and Computer Engineering contains 37 revised and extended research articles written by prominent researchers participating in the conference. Topics covered include artificial intelligence, decision supporting systems, automated planning, automation systems, control engineering, systems identification, modelling and simulation, communication systems, signal processing, and industrial applications. Intelligent Automation and Computer Engineering offers the state of the art of tremendous advances in intelligent automation and computer engineering and also serves as an excellent reference text for researchers and graduate students, working on intelligent automation and computer engineering.

Download or read book Tetrobot written by Gregory J. Hamlin and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robotic systems are characterized by the intersection of computer intelligence with the physical world. This blend of physical reasoning and computational intelligence is well illustrated by the Tetrobot study described in this book. Tetrobot: A Modular Approach to Reconfigurable Parallel Robotics describes a new approach to the design of robotic systems. The Tetrobot approach utilizes modular components which may be reconfigured into many different mechanisms which are suited to different applications. The Tetrobot system includes two unique contributions: a new mechanism (a multilink spherical joint design), and a new control architecture based on propagation of kinematic solutions through the structure. The resulting Tetrobot system consists of fundamental components which may be mechanically reassembled into any modular configuration, and the control architecture will provide position control of the resulting structure. A prototype Tetrobot system has been built and evaluated experimentally. Tetrobot arms, platforms, and walking machines have been built and controlled in a variety of motion and loading conditions. The Tetrobot system has applications in a variety of domains where reconfiguration, flexibility, load capacity, and failure recovery are important aspects of the task. A number of key research directions have been opened by the Tetrobot research activities. Continuing topics of interest include: development of a more distributed implementation of the computer control architecture, analysis of the dynamics of the Tetrobot system motion for improved control of high-speed motions, integration of sensor systems to control the motion and shape of the high-dimensionality systems, and exploration of self-reconfiguration of the system. Tetrobot: A Modular Approach to Reconfigurable Parallel Robotics will be of interest to research workers, specialists and professionals in the areas of robotics, mechanical systems and computer engineering.

Download or read book Design by Composition for Rapid Prototyping written by Michael Binnard and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At first glance, a book on "Design by Composition for Rapid Prototyping" may seem out of place in a series on Robotics. However, this work has a couple of strong connections to the field of robotics and the robotics community, and I am delighted to introduce it to the series. The first connection is the motivation behind Binnard's work. Michael Binnard came to Stanford after having done his Masters thesis at the M.LT. Artificial Intelligence Lab, where he designed and built small walking robots, such as Boadicea (http://www.ai.mit.eduJprojects/boadicea/).At M.LT. he observed first-hand how difficult it is to align, connect and support standard actuators, sensors, and processors in small mobile robots. Figure lea) below shows how complicated it is just to connect a simple motor to one link of a robot leg using conventional methods. Surely there had to be a better way! Shape deposition manufacturing, an emerging rapid prototyping process, offered a possible solution. Actuators, sensors, processors and other components could be embedded directly into almost arbitrary three-dimensional shapes, without any of the fasteners and couplings that complicate the design in Figure lea). The process makes it possible to construct integrated robotic mechanisms, such as the example shown in Figure 1 (b) and the additional examples found in Chapters 7 and 8 of this monograph.

Download or read book Advances in Networked Enterprises written by Luis M. Camarinha-Matos and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-06-05 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New market trends and the emergence of the so-called Internet-based `new economy' are leading companies to new forms of organization, mostly relying on privileged cooperation links. Nowadays, most manufacturing processes are not carried out by single enterprises. Rather, organizations feel the need to focus on their core competencies and join efforts with others, in order to fulfill the requirements of new products/services demanded by the global market. In a cooperative networked organization, every enterprise is just a node that adds some value to the process; namely, a step in the manufacturing/supply chain. Furthermore, manufacturing companies increasingly encompass what has typically been regarded as the domain of the service sector. They try to establish long-term relationships with their customers, in order to service their needs around a manufactured product. For these reasons, the area of virtual organizations and industrial virtual enterprises is attracting growing interest in terms of research and development, and implementation approaches for new business practices. The main emphasis of this book is on virtual enterprises and other networked organizations, with special focus on: supporting infrastructures and management of distributed business processes, intelligent multi-agent systems, knowledge management, human interfaces, and socio-economical aspects. Also included in the book are related topics on automation, both in manufacturing and transportation. Special attention is assigned to the fact that advances in information technology and new organizational paradigms will be used not only to induce new economic structures, but also to help a sustainable migration of existing systems towards the new economy. When electronic business initiatives attract such widespread attention, it is important to conciliate the `old' and `new' economies under a balanced perspective. Advances in Networked Enterprises is essential reading for researchers and engineering students in production engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, industrial sociology, and transportation, as well as for engineers and practitioners in manufacturing and transportation systems organization and planning.

Download or read book Darwin2K written by Chris Leger and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Darwin2K: An Evolutionary Approach to Automated Design for Robotics is an essential reference tool for researchers, professionals, and students involved in robot design or in evolutionary synthesis, design, and optimization. It is also necessary for users of Darwin2K. Researchers and hobbyists interested in genetic algorithms and artificial life techniques will find the book interesting. The primary purpose of this book is to describe a methodology for using computers to automatically design robots to meet the specific needs of an application. Details of many novel aspects of the methodology are presented, including an evolutionary algorithm for synthesizing and optimizing multiple objective functions, an algorithm for dynamic simulation of arbitrary robots, an extensible software architecture, and a new representation for robots that is appropriate for robot design. The methodology as a whole is significant in terms of its impact on robot design practices, and as a case study in building evolutionary design systems. Individual parts of the systems are also relevant to other areas. For example, the evolutionary algorithm can be used for design and optimization problems other than robotics, and the dynamic simulation algorithm can be used for analysis and simulation of existing robots or as a part of a manual design tool. The book also gives an overview of previous work in automated design of robots, and of evolutionary design in other engineering disciplines.

Download or read book Perceptual Metrics for Image Database Navigation written by Yossi Rubner and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The increasing amount of information available in today's world raises the need to retrieve relevant data efficiently. Unlike text-based retrieval, where keywords are successfully used to index into documents, content-based image retrieval poses up front the fundamental questions how to extract useful image features and how to use them for intuitive retrieval. We present a novel approach to the problem of navigating through a collection of images for the purpose of image retrieval, which leads to a new paradigm for image database search. We summarize the appearance of images by distributions of color or texture features, and we define a metric between any two such distributions. This metric, which we call the "Earth Mover's Distance" (EMD), represents the least amount of work that is needed to rearrange the mass is one distribution in order to obtain the other. We show that the EMD matches perceptual dissimilarity better than other dissimilarity measures, and argue that it has many desirable properties for image retrieval. Using this metric, we employ Multi-Dimensional Scaling techniques to embed a group of images as points in a two- or three-dimensional Euclidean space so that their distances reflect image dissimilarities as well as possible. Such geometric embeddings exhibit the structure in the image set at hand, allowing the user to understand better the result of a database query and to refine the query in a perceptually intuitive way.