Have you ever wondered what an octopus made from a coat hook would look like? Or a crocodile made from pliers? How about a fish made from a lightbulb? Wonder no more, because they have all been created in this unique book. Each page has tactile embossing, specially designed to stimulate young children through sensory play, and bouncy rhyming text, great for reading out loud. These quirky characters are sure to spark creativity, encourage young children to think about recycling and inspire them to invent their own Bot creatures.

Come and meet Octobot, Crocobot, and the rest of the gang with Clever Bots: Busy Bots! Have you ever wondered what an octopus made from a coat hook would look like? Or a crocodile made from pliers? How about a fish made from a lightbulb? Wonder no more, because Roger Priddy’s fantastically quirky imagination has created them all in this unique book. Each page has tactile embossing, specially designed to stimulate young children through sensory play, and bouncy rhyming text, great for reading out loud. These quirky characters are sure to spark creativity, encourage young children to think about recycling and inspire them to invent their very own Bot creatures.

In the second installment in the Robots Rule series, George is thrilled to score his dream job at Tinker Tech Industries. But he and his best pal Jackbot soon realize that something does not compute. Gizmos and gadgets combine with mystery-by-the-megabyte in this rollicking robot adventure for readers ages 9 to 12.

Robotics is an ever-expanding field and intelligent planning continues to play a major role. Given that the intention of mobile robots is to carry out tasks independent from human aid, robot intelligence is needed to make and plan out decisions based on various sensors. Planning is the fundamental activity that implements this intelligence into the mobile robots to complete such tasks. Understanding problems, challenges, and solutions to path planning and how it fits in is important to the realm of robotics. Intelligent Planning for Mobile Robotics: Algorithmic Approaches presents content coverage on the basics of artificial intelligence, search problems, and soft computing approaches. This collection of research provides insight on both robotics and basic algorithms and could serve as a reference book for courses related to robotics, special topics in AI, planning, applied soft computing, applied AI, and applied evolutionary computing. It is an ideal choice for research students, scholars, and professors alike.

Robotics is a highly interdisciplinary research topic, that requires integration of methods for mechanics, control engineering, signal processing, planning, gra- ics, human-computer interaction, real-time systems, applied mathematics, and software engineering to enable construction of fully operational systems. The diversity of topics needed to design, implement, and deploy such systems implies that it is almost impossible for individual teams to provide the needed critical mass for such endeavors. To facilitate interaction and progress on sensor-based intelligent robotics inter-disciplinary workshops are necessary through which - depthdiscussioncanbeusedforcrossdisseminationbetweendi?erentdisciplines. The Dagstuhl foundation has organized a number of workshops on Mod- ing and Integration of Sensor Based Intelligent Robot Systems. The Dagstuhl seminars take place over a full week in a beautiful setting in the Saarland in Germany. The setting provides an ideal environment for in-depth presentations and rich interaction between the participants. This volume contains papers presented during the fourth workshop held - tober 15–20, 2000. All papers were submitted by workshop attendees, and were reviewed by at least one reviewer. We wish to thank all of the reviewers for their invaluable help in making this a high-quality selection of papers. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Schloss Dagstuhl Foundation and the sta? at Springer-Verlag. Without their support the production of this volume would not have been possible.

Count from 1 to 10 with fun and colorful pop-up robots!

Introduction to Intelligent Simulation of Complex Discrete Systems and Processes: RAO Language focuses on a unique approach in modeling and simulation of complex systems. In this volume are considered features of complex systems and processes, their mathematical description, and modeling. Theoretical foundations of the RAO (Resource-Action-Operation) language as well as its syntax and utilisation are given. Examples of simulation models of different complexity levels, related to different fields, are also presented. The RAO intelligent modeling system, introduced and described in Introduction to Intelligent Simulation of Complex Discrete Systems and Processes is unique because: (1) it makes simulation modeling universal for the classes of systems and processes modeled; (2) it is simple to modify the models; and (3) it has the capacity to model complex control systems together with the object controlled (including simulation modeling for on-line control). The RAO tool allows the user to use a language very similar to his professional language and rids him of intermediary, supplementary description of the system modeled. In fifteen chapters this volume provides an overview of general modeling trends, and hence serves the research community in guiding their modeling methods; intelligent simulation modeling is introduced to solve complex systems and processes.