Böcker i Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics-serien

This book deals with the study of tilt-rotor omnidirectional aerial robots and their application to aerial physical interaction tasks. Omnidirectional aerial robots possess decoupled translational and rotational dynamics, which are important for stable and sustained aerial interaction. The additional ability to dynamically re-orient thrust vectors opens the door to a wide array of possible morphologies and system capabilities. Through modeling, control, prototype design, and experimental evaluation, this book presents a comprehensive methodology and examples for the development of a novel tilt-rotor aerial manipulator. This work serves as a guide for envisioning and constructing innovative systems that will advance the frontier of aerial manipulation.

This book introduces several appearance-based place recognition pipelines based on different mapping techniques for addressing loop-closure detection in mobile platforms with limited computational resources. The motivation behind this book has been the prospect that in many contemporary applications efficient methods are needed that can provide high performance under run-time and memory constraints. Thus, three different mapping techniques for addressing the task of place recognition for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) are presented. The book at hand follows a tutorial-based structure describing each of the main parts needed for a loop-closure detection pipeline to facilitate the newcomers. It mainly goes through a historical review of the problem, focusing on how it was addressed during the years reaching the current age. This way, the reader is initially familiarized with each part while the place recognition paradigms follow.

Using a designed vector field to guide robots to follow a given geometric desired path has found a range of practical applications, such as underwater pipeline inspection, warehouse navigation, and highway traffic monitoring. It is thus in great need to build a rigorous theory to guide practical implementations with formal guarantees. It is even so when multiple robots are required to follow predefined desired paths or maneuver on surfaces and coordinate their motions to efficiently accomplish repetitive and laborious tasks.The book introduces guiding vector fields on Euclidean spaces and Riemannian manifolds for single-robot and multi-robot path-following and motion coordination, provides rigorous theoretical guarantees of vector field guided motion control of robotic systems, and elaborates on the practical implementation of the proposed algorithms on mobile wheeled robots and fixed-wing aircraft. It provides guidelines for the robust, reliable, and safe practical implementations for robotic tasks, including path-following navigation, obstacle-avoidance, and multi-robot motion coordination.In particular, the book reveals fundamental theoretic underpinnings of guiding vector fields and applies to addressing various robot motion control problems. Notably, it answers many crucial and challenging questions such as:· How to generate a general guiding vector field on any n-dimensional Riemannian manifold for robot motion control tasks?· Do singular points always exist in a general guiding vector field?· How to generate a guiding vector field that is free of singular points?· How to design control algorithms based on guiding vector fields for different robot motion control tasks including path-following, obstacle-avoidance, and multi-robot distributed motion coordination?Answering these questions has led to the discovery of fundamental assumptions, a ¿topological surgery¿ to create a singularity-free guiding vector field, a robot navigation algorithm with the global convergence property, a provably safe collision-avoidance algorithm and an effective distributed motion control algorithm, etc

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) has been a long-standing research problem in robotics. It describes the problem of a robot mapping an unknown environment, while simultaneously localizing in it with the help of the incomplete map. This book describes a technique called Switchable Constraints.Switchable Constraints help to increase the robustness of SLAM against data association errors and in particular against false positive loop closure detections. Such false positive loop closure detections can occur when the robot erroneously assumes it re-observed a landmark it has already mapped or when the appearance of the observed surroundings is very similar to the appearance of other places in the map. Ambiguous observations and appearances are very common in human-made environments such as office floors or suburban streets, making robustness against spurious observations a key challenge in SLAM. The book summarizes the foundations of factor graph-based SLAM techniques. Itexplains the problem of data association errors before introducing the novel idea of Switchable Constraints. We present a mathematical derivation and probabilistic interpretation of Switchable Constraints along with evaluations on different datasets. The book shows that Switchable Constraints are applicable beyond SLAM problems and demonstrates the efficacy of this technique to improve the quality of satellite-based localization in urban environments, where multipath and non-line-of-sight situations are common error sources.

This book presents theoretical foundations and technical implementation guidelines for multi-vehicle fleet maneuvering, which can be implemented by readers and can also be a basis for future research. As a research monograph, this book presents fundamental concepts, theories, and technologies for localization, motion planning, and control of multi-vehicle systems, which can be a reference book for researchers and graduate students from different levels. As a technical guide, this book provides implementation guidelines, pseudocode, and flow diagrams for practitioners to develop their own systems. Readers should have a preliminary knowledge of mobile robotics, state estimation and automatic control to fully understand the contents in this book. To make this book more readable and understandable, extensive experimental results are presented to support each chapter.

This book explores cloud robotics by casting a light on key issues and proposing a novel approach towards implementation and practical aspects to allow for the widespread adoption of cloud-based functionality. The advent of cloud robotics can to unleash a new generation of smart robotic devices by allowing robots to explore cloud computing capabilities to share data and to offload heavy processing applications. Cloud robotics is investigated as an enabler to a series of applications and devices, questioning how the insertion of network and cloud technologies into such systems might affect the interaction between a robot and the human operating it, and what are the limiting requirements for cloud-based solutions. Aiming at researchers and practitioners, this book also presents a methodology based on open-source software and commercial off-the-shelf devices to provide a common standard for reproducing and benchmarking different cloud robotics systems.

This book aims at sharing knowledge about the technological opportunities and the main research challenges regarding robotics for logistics in supermarkets and retail stores, from the perspectives of the end-users, logistic companies, technology providers, and robotic researchers. The authors have been involved into the H2020 project Robotics Enabling Fully Integrated Logistics Lines for Supermarkets (REFILLS), aimed at improving logistics in supermarkets thanks to mobile robotic systems in close and smart collaboration with humans. The readers will find a comprehensive analysis of the main logistic processes in retail stores with possible robotized solutions, involving mechanical design, perception, and control. These technologies have been validated in realistic environments, and some of them have been tested into real supermarkets. The book is intended for a broad academic and industrial readership, including operators in the field of logistics, distribution, and retail.

Intended to promote the advancement of aerial physical interaction, it analyzes a particular class of aerial robots: tethered aerial vehicles.

This book presents the main achievements of the EuRoC (European Robotics Challenges) project, which ran from 1st January,2014 to 30th June 2018 and was funded by the European Union under the 7th Framework Programme.

This textbook offers a tutorial introduction to robotics and control which is light and easy to absorb. The practice of robotics and control both involve the application of computational algorithms to data.

This book aims at providing algorithms for balance control of legged, torque-controlled humanoid robots. Using multiple contacts increases the size of the support polygon, which in turn leads to an increased robustness of the stance and to an increased kinematic workspace of the robot.

To address this problem the authors introduce Active Scene Recognition (ASR), a concept that embeds canonical scene recognition in a decision-making system that selects camera views for a mobile robot to drive to so that it can find objects not yet localized.

Aerial robotic manipulation integrates concepts and technologies coming from unmanned aerial systems and robotics manipulation.

This book tackles all the stages and mechanisms involved in the learning of manipulation tasks by bimanual robots in unstructured settings, as it can be the task of folding clothes. The first part describes how to build an integrated system, capable of properly handling the kinematics and dynamics of the robot along the learning process.

In this book Part I presents first an overview of the ECHORD++ project, with its mission and vision together with a detailed structure of its functionalities and instruments: Experiments, Robotic Innovation Facilities and Public end-user Driven Technology Innovation PDTI.

Do the words borrowed from the living organisms and used to describe robots play a role in the confusion about the status of the discipline of robotics?

This monograph introduces a unifying framework for mapping, planning and exploration with mobile robots considering uncertainty, linking such problems with a common SLAM approach, adopting Pose SLAM as the basic state estimation machinery.

This book presents the development of a new multimodal human-robot interface for testing and validating control strategies applied to robotic walkers for assisting human mobility and gait rehabilitation.

This book introduces novel thinking and techniques to the control of robotic manipulation. In particular, the concept of teleimpedance control as an alternative method to bilateral force-reflecting teleoperation control for robotic manipulation is introduced.

This book examines the main control aspects in dynamic robotic control of underwater vehicles. It presents a mathematical model with significant impact on the control strategy.