Recent advances in RbD have identified a number of key issues for ensuring a generic approach to the transfer of skills across various agents and contexts. This book focuses on the two generic questions of what to imitate and how to imitate and proposes active teaching methods.
The second edition of this handbook provides a state-of-the-art overview on the various aspects in the rapidly developing field of robotics. Reaching for the human frontier, robotics is vigorously engaged in the growing challenges of new emerging domains. Interacting, exploring, and working with humans, the new generation of robots will increasingly touch people and their lives. The credible prospect of practical robots among humans is the result of the scientific endeavour of a half a century of robotic developments that established robotics as a modern scientific discipline. The ongoing vibrant expansion and strong growth of the field during the last decade has fueled this second edition of the Springer Handbook of Robotics. The first edition of the handbook soon became a landmark in robotics publishing and won the American Association of Publishers PROSE Award for Excellence in Physical Sciences & Mathematics as well as the organization’s Award for Engineering & Technology. The second edition of the handbook, edited by two internationally renowned scientists with the support of an outstanding team of seven part editors and more than 200 authors, continues to be an authoritative reference for robotics researchers, newcomers to the field, and scholars from related disciplines. The contents have been restructured to achieve four main objectives: the enlargement of foundational topics for robotics, the enlightenment of design of various types of robotic systems, the extension of the treatment on robots moving in the environment, and the enrichment of advanced robotics applications. Further to an extensive update, fifteen new chapters have been introduced on emerging topics, and a new generation of authors have joined the handbook’s team. A novel addition to the second edition is a comprehensive collection of multimedia references to more than 700 videos, which bring valuable insight into the contents. The videos can be viewed directly augmented into the text with a smartphone or tablet using a unique and specially designed app. Springer Handbook of Robotics Multimedia Extension Portal: http://handbookofrobotics.org/
Methods by which robots can learn control laws that enable real-time reactivity using dynamical systems; with applications and exercises. This book presents a wealth of machine learning techniques to make the control of robots more flexible and safe when interacting with humans. It introduces a set of control laws that enable reactivity using dynamical systems, a widely used method for solving motion-planning problems in robotics. These control approaches can replan in milliseconds to adapt to new environmental constraints and offer safe and compliant control of forces in contact. The techniques offer theoretical advantages, including convergence to a goal, non-penetration of obstacles, and passivity. The coverage of learning begins with low-level control parameters and progresses to higher-level competencies composed of combinations of skills. Learning for Adaptive and Reactive Robot Control is designed for graduate-level courses in robotics, with chapters that proceed from fundamentals to more advanced content. Techniques covered include learning from demonstration, optimization, and reinforcement learning, and using dynamical systems in learning control laws, trajectory planning, and methods for compliant and force control . Features for teaching in each chapter: applications, which range from arm manipulators to whole-body control of humanoid robots; pencil-and-paper and programming exercises; lecture videos, slides, and MATLAB code examples available on the author’s website . an eTextbook platform website offering protected material[EPS2] for instructors including solutions.
This Open Access proceedings presents a good overview of the current research landscape of assembly, handling and industrial robotics. The objective of MHI Colloquium is the successful networking at both academic and management level. Thereby, the colloquium focuses an academic exchange at a high level in order to distribute the obtained research results, to determine synergy effects and trends, to connect the actors in person and in conclusion, to strengthen the research field as well as the MHI community. In addition, there is the possibility to become acquatined with the organizing institute. Primary audience is formed by members of the scientific society for assembly, handling and industrial robotics (WGMHI). The Editors Prof. Dr.-Ing. Thorsten Schüppstuhl is head of the Institute of Aircraft Production Technology (IFPT) at the Hamburg University of Technology. Prof. Dr.-Ing. Kirsten Tracht is head of the Bremen Institute for Mechanical Engineering (bime) at the University of Bremen. Prof. Dr.-Ing. Annika Raatz is head of the Institute of Assembly Technology (match) at the Leibniz University Hannover.
Chapter 3. Topics; Publishing to a Topic; Checking That Everything Works as Expected; Subscribing to a Topic; Checking That Everything Works as Expected; Latched Topics; Defining Your Own Message Types; Defining a New Message; Using Your New Message; When Should You Make a New Message Type?; Mixing Publishers and Subscribers; Summary; Chapter 4. Services; Defining a Service; Implementing a Service; Checking That Everything Works as Expected; Other Ways of Returning Values from a Service; Using a Service; Checking That Everything Works as Expected; Other Ways to Call Services; Summary.
The term “mechatronics” was coined in 1969, merging “mecha” from mechanism and “tronics” from electronics, to reflect the original idea at the basis of this discipline, that is, the integration of electrical and mechanical systems into a single device. The spread of this term, and of mechatronics itself, has been growing in the years, including new aspects and disciplines, like control engineering, computer engineering and communication/information engineering. Nowadays mechatronics has a well-defined and fundamental role, in strict relation with robotics. Drawing a sharp border between mechatronics and robotics is impossible, as they share many technologies and objectives. Advanced robots could be defined as mechatronic devices equipped with a “smart brain”, but there are also up-to-date mechatronic devices, used in tight interaction with humans, that are governed by smart architectures (for example, for safety purposes). Aim of this book is to offer a wide overview of new research trends and challenges for both mechatronics and robotics, through the contribution of researchers from different institutions, providing their view on specific subjects they consider as “hot topics” in both fields, with attention to new fields of application, new challenges to the research communities and new technologies available. The reader of this book will enjoy the various contributions, as they have been prepared with actual applications in mind, along a journey from advanced actuators and sensors to human-robot interaction, through robot control, navigation, planning and programming issues. The book presents several state-of-the-art solutions, like multiple-stage actuation to cope with conflicting specification of large motion-spans, ultra-high accuracy, model-based control for high-tech mechatronic systems, modern approaches of software systems engineering to robotics, aand humanoids for human assistance. The reader can also find new techniques in approaching the design of mechatronic systems in some possible industrial and service robotics scenarios, with a particular attention for the interaction between humans and mechanisms.
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.
The author has maintained two open-source MATLAB Toolboxes for more than 10 years: one for robotics and one for vision. The key strength of the Toolboxes provide a set of tools that allow the user to work with real problems, not trivial examples. For the student the book makes the algorithms accessible, the Toolbox code can be read to gain understanding, and the examples illustrate how it can be used —instant gratification in just a couple of lines of MATLAB code. The code can also be the starting point for new work, for researchers or students, by writing programs based on Toolbox functions, or modifying the Toolbox code itself. The purpose of this book is to expand on the tutorial material provided with the toolboxes, add many more examples, and to weave this into a narrative that covers robotics and computer vision separately and together. The author shows how complex problems can be decomposed and solved using just a few simple lines of code, and hopefully to inspire up and coming researchers. The topics covered are guided by the real problems observed over many years as a practitioner of both robotics and computer vision. It is written in a light but informative style, it is easy to read and absorb, and includes a lot of Matlab examples and figures. The book is a real walk through the fundamentals of robot kinematics, dynamics and joint level control, then camera models, image processing, feature extraction and epipolar geometry, and bring it all together in a visual servo system. Additional material is provided at http://www.petercorke.com/RVC
Industrial Robots Programming focuses on designing and building robotic manufacturing cells, and explores the capabilities of today’s industrial equipment as well as the latest computer and software technologies. Special attention is given to the input devices and systems that create efficient human-machine interfaces, and how they help non-technical personnel perform necessary programming, control, and supervision tasks. Drawing upon years of practical experience and using numerous examples and illustrative applications, J. Norberto Pires covers robotics programming as it applies to: The current industrial robotic equipment including manipulators, control systems, and programming environments. Software interfaces that can be used to develop distributed industrial manufacturing cells and techniques which can be used to build interfaces between robots and computers. Real-world applications with examples designed and implemented recently in the lab. Industrial Robots Programming has been selected for indexing by Scopus. For more information about Industrial Robotics, please find the author's Industrial Robotics collection at the iTunesU University of Coimbra channel.