Human-robot interaction research is diverse and covers a wide range of topics. All aspects of human factors and robotics are within the purview of HRI research so far as they provide insight into how to improve our understanding in developing effective tools, protocols, and systems to enhance HRI. For example, a significant research effort is being devoted to designing human-robot interface that makes it easier for the people to interact with robots. …
Planning Algorithms
Written for computer scientists and engineers with interests in artificial intelligence, robotics, or control theory, this is the only book on this topic that tightly integrates a vast body of literature from several fields into a coherent source for teaching and reference in a wide variety of applications. This free book can be downloaded in pdf and html formats. …
Rehabilitation Robotics
The coupling of several areas of the medical field with recent advances in robotic systems has seen a paradigm shift in our approach to selected sectors of medical care, especially over the last decade. Rehabilitation medicine is one such area. The development of advanced robotic systems has ushered with it an exponential number of trials and experiments aimed at optimising restoration of quality of life to those who are physically debilitated. …
Parallel Manipulators, Towards New Applications
In recent years, parallel kinematics mechanisms have attracted a lot of attention from the academic and industrial communities due to potential applications not only as robot manipulators but also as machine tools. Generally, the criteria used to compare the performance of traditional serial robots and parallel robots are the workspace, the ratio between the payload and the robot mass, accuracy, and dynamic behaviour. …
Robotic Soccer
Many papers in the book concern advanced research on (multi-)robot subsystems, naturally motivated by the challenges posed by robot soccer, but certainly applicable to other domains: …
Humanitarian Demining
United Nation Department of Human Affairs (UNDHA) assesses that there are more than 100 million mines that are scattered across the world and pose significant hazards in more than 68 countries. The international Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) estimates that the casualty rate from landmines currently exceeds 26,000 persons every year. It is estimated that more than 800 persons are killed and 1,200 maimed each month by landmines around the world. …
Swarm Intelligence, Focus on Ant and Particle Swarm Optimization
In the era globalisation the emerging technologies are governing engineering industries to a multifaceted state. The escalating complexity has demanded researchers to find the possible ways of easing the solution of the problems. …
Climbing and Walking Robots Towards New Applications
With the advancement of technology, new exciting approaches enable us to render mobile robotic systems more versatile, robust and cost-efficient. Some researchers combine climbing and walking techniques with a modular approach, a reconfigurable approach, or a swarm approach to realize novel prototypes as flexible mobile robotic platforms featuring all necessary locomotion capabilities. …
Bioinspiration and Robotics Walking and Climbing Robots
Nature has always been a source of inspiration and ideas for the robotics community. New solutions and technologies are required and hence this book is coming out to address and deal with the main challenges facing walking and climbing robots, and contributes with innovative solutions, designs, technologies and techniques. …
Neural Networks
Free online book “Neural Networks” by Genevieve Orr. It’s goal is to introduce students to a powerful class of model, the Neural Network, a broad term which includes many diverse models and approaches. It will first motivate networks by analogy to the brain. The analogy is loose, but serves to introduce the idea of parallel and distributed computation. …