Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots

ISBN:026219502X
Pages:331
Date:2004-04-01
Publisher:The MIT Press
Rating:4.5

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    Book Description
Mobile robots range from the teleoperated Sojourner on the Mars Pathfinder mission to cleaning robots in the Paris Metro. Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots offers students and other interested readers an overview of the technology of mobility -- 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 discusses all facets of mobile robotics, including hardware design, wheel design, kinematics analysis, sensors and perception, localization, mapping, and robot control architectures. The design of any successful robot involves the integration of many different disciplines, among them kinematics, signal analysis, information theory, artificial intelligence, and probability theory. Reflecting this, the book presents the techniques and technology that enable mobility in a series of interacting modules. Each chapter covers a different aspect of mobility, as the book moves from low-level to high-level details. The first two chapters explore low-level locomotory ability, examining robots' wheels and legs and the principles of kinematics. This is followed by an in-depth view of perception, including descriptions of many "off-the-shelf" sensors and an analysis of the interpretation of sensed data. The final two chapters consider the higher-level challenges of localization and cognition, discussing successful localization strategies, autonomous mapping, and navigation competence. Bringing together all aspects of mobile robotics into one volume, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots can serve as a textbook for coursework or a working tool for beginners in the field./p>
Reviews From AMAZON.COM
Good guide to computational robotics
This book is one of only a few of its kind. That is, it is a book that focuses on the computational issues in robotics rather than the all-too familiar hobbyist approach. Chapter one is somewhat expendable, since it is simply a prosaic overview of the entire text. Chapter two talks about the theory of robot motion at a high level, with few helpful technical details. Chapter three, "Mobile Robot Kinematics", is where the book takes a dramatic upturn in quality. The computations of robot kinematics are discussed in detail for several kinds of robotic wheels. To really understand this chapter, the reader should already be familiar with dynamics and statics as well as the concepts of three dimensional rotation and matrices. For a companion to the kinematic material, I suggest Craig's "Introduction to Robotics: Mechanics and Control (3rd Edition)". It is much better than the reviewers say. Chapter four covers the various sensors used in robotics, as well as the mathematics needed in the integration of those sensors. The chapter concludes with some basic image processing and computer vision techniques. The material here is broad but somewhat shallow. I suggest that you already be familiar with basic image processing techniques and computer vision, or possibly have a copy of Gonzales & Woods "Digital Image Processing" handy, as well as a copy of Trucco & Verri's "Introductory Techniques for 3D Computer Vision". This is especially true if you wish to grasp some of the statistical techniques at the end of chapter four. Chapters five and six, on localization and navigation, respectively, are mathematically deep. The material on the Kalman Filter is somewhat oversimplified, and to truly grasp the subject of Kalman Filtering one will need to go to an outside source for a full tutorial. In my case, my instructor's notes were sufficient.In summary, this is a very good book for someone who is mathematically mature enough to handle the computational aspects of mobile robotics. The reader should already understand dynamics, statics, numerical linear algebra, image processing, artificial intelligence, and computer vision. This book collects and connects all of these concepts well, but you will have to go digging elsewhere for the complete amount of detail required to perform all of the calculations for the methods described in this book. In short, computational robotics is a type of "capstone course" for engineers/computer scientists with the correct background and reference library, and for those engineers, this is the best guide published to date.
Great emphasis and overview
Having spent years working in this field, this book in my opinion places the emphasis on one of the most basic yet most important robotics problems of today: mobility. It also addresses other broad issues related to mobile robots. Despite the book's breadth, it is filled with numerous great examples of functioning robots. The robotics problems tackled by each chapter are well explained and the exposition is deep enough for the reader to truly understand the main issues and the main solutions associated with each research challenge. It is a book that in my opinion can be enjoyed by both an expert and a complete novice in robotics. It's fun to browse, yet if you want to delve into more detail on any given topic you can.