Damien Wood's path to adulthood in the last decade of the 20th century is marked with effortless success--creative, financial, sexual. Yet his half-Asian lineage with its inherent cultural clashes is coupled with the inability to be touched by feelings or the people around him. Damien's efforts to reach his inner self take him from place to place and one hollow relationship to another, but he remains stuck outside of his experiences, a robot convincingly playing the role of daredevil artist and globetrotter.Then, the century turns. As Damien's mother dies after a long and agonizing illness, and 9/11 inaugurates a reign of fear and terror, his emotions, from desire to despair, begin to emerge unbidden. These birth pangs of humanity send Damien on a mordantly comic, darkly suspenseful quest from the Americas through Southeast Asia in the company of an expatriate colony with too little to lose - including values - until violence comes to claim him as one of its own. No longer a robot, Damien has become a wanted man.A daring hybrid of adventure, verse, and travel fiction, framed by a chronicle of self-revelation in a pitch-perfect voice for the post-millennium, this book heralds the return of a novelist of impressive literary gifts.

A broadly accessible introduction to robotics that spans the most basic concepts and the most novel applications; for students, teachers, and hobbyists. The Robotics Primer offers a broadly accessible introduction to robotics for students at pre-university and university levels, robot hobbyists, and anyone interested in this burgeoning field. The text takes the reader from the most basic concepts (including perception and movement) to the most novel and sophisticated applications and topics (humanoids, shape-shifting robots, space robotics), with an emphasis on what it takes to create autonomous intelligent robot behavior. The core concepts of robotics are carried through from fundamental definitions to more complex explanations, all presented in an engaging, conversational style that will appeal to readers of different backgrounds. The Robotics Primer covers such topics as the definition of robotics, the history of robotics (“Where do Robots Come From?”), robot components, locomotion, manipulation, sensors, control, control architectures, representation, behavior (“Making Your Robot Behave”), navigation, group robotics, learning, and the future of robotics (and its ethical implications). To encourage further engagement, experimentation, and course and lesson design, The Robotics Primer is accompanied by a free robot programming exercise workbook that implements many of the ideas on the book on iRobot platforms. The Robotics Primer is unique as a principled, pedagogical treatment of the topic that is accessible to a broad audience; the only prerequisites are curiosity and attention. It can be used effectively in an educational setting or more informally for self-instruction. The Robotics Primer is a springboard for readers of all backgrounds—including students taking robotics as an elective outside the major, graduate students preparing to specialize in robotics, and K-12 teachers who bring robotics into their classrooms.

This title aimed at the sci-fi fan and TV viewer -- the Trekkie, broadly defined -- serves as a tie-in to the hit TV series -- 22 new episodes just commissioned by the Sci-Fi Channel -- and a companion to the Putnam Berkley novelizations. "Sliders" is an illustrated guide to the fantasy adventures of the time- and space-traveling crew, and provides detailed descriptions of the parallel universes that are visited. "Sliders" also serves up plot lines of the episodes, as well as in-depth interviews with its stars and a behind-the-scenes tour led by the show's writers and producers.

This book shares important findings on the application of robotics in industry using advanced mechanisms, including software and hardware. It presents a collection of recent trends and research on various advanced computing paradigms such as soft computing, robotics, smart automation, power control, and uncertainty analysis. The book constitutes the proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Application of Robotics in Industry using Advanced Mechanisms (ARIAM2019), which offered a platform for sharing original research findings, presenting innovative ideas and applications, and comparing notes on various aspects of robotics. The contributions highlight the latest research and industrial applications of robotics, and discuss approaches to improving the smooth functioning of industries. Moreover, they focus on designing solutions for complex engineering problems and designing system components or processes to meet specific needs, with due considerations for public health and safety, including cultural, societal, and environmental considerations. Taken together, they offer a valuable resource for researchers, scientists, engineers, professionals and students alike.

The second edition of a comprehensive introduction to all aspects of mobile robotics, from algorithms to mechanisms. Mobile robots range from the Mars Pathfinder mission's teleoperated Sojourner to the cleaning robots in the Paris Metro. This text offers students and other interested readers an introduction to the fundamentals of mobile robotics, spanning the mechanical, motor, sensory, perceptual, and cognitive layers the field comprises. The text focuses on mobility itself, offering an overview of 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 synthesizes material from such fields as kinematics, control theory, signal analysis, computer vision, information theory, artificial intelligence, and probability theory. The book presents the techniques and technology that enable mobility in a series of interacting modules. Each chapter treats a different aspect of mobility, as the book moves from low-level to high-level details. It covers all aspects of mobile robotics, including software and hardware design considerations, related technologies, and algorithmic techniques. This second edition has been revised and updated throughout, with 130 pages of new material on such topics as locomotion, perception, localization, and planning and navigation. Problem sets have been added at the end of each chapter. Bringing together all aspects of mobile robotics into one volume, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots can serve as a textbook or a working tool for beginning practitioners. Curriculum developed by Dr. Robert King, Colorado School of Mines, and Dr. James Conrad, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, to accompany the National Instruments LabVIEW Robotics Starter Kit, are available. Included are 13 (6 by Dr. King and 7 by Dr. Conrad) laboratory exercises for using the LabVIEW Robotics Starter Kit to teach mobile robotics concepts.

Behavior Trees (BTs) provide a way to structure the behavior of an artificial agent such as a robot or a non-player character in a computer game. Traditional design methods, such as finite state machines, are known to produce brittle behaviors when complexity increases, making it very hard to add features without breaking existing functionality. BTs were created to address this very problem, and enables the creation of systems that are both modular and reactive. Behavior Trees in Robotics and AI: An Introduction provides a broad introduction as well as an in-depth exploration of the topic, and is the first comprehensive book on the use of BTs. This book introduces the subject of BTs from simple topics, such as semantics and design principles, to complex topics, such as learning and task planning. For each topic, the authors provide a set of examples, ranging from simple illustrations to realistic complex behaviors, to enable the reader to successfully combine theory with practice. Starting with an introduction to BTs, the book then describes how BTs relate to, and in many cases, generalize earlier switching structures, or control architectures. These ideas are then used as a foundation for a set of efficient and easy to use design principles. The book then presents a set of important extensions and provides a set of tools for formally analyzing these extensions using a state space formulation of BTs. With the new analysis tools, the book then formalizes the descriptions of how BTs generalize earlier approaches and shows how BTs can be automatically generated using planning and learning. The final part of the book provides an extended set of tools to capture the behavior of Stochastic BTs, where the outcomes of actions are described by probabilities. These tools enable the computation of both success probabilities and time to completion. This book targets a broad audience, including both students and professionals interested in modeling complex behaviors for robots, game characters, or other AI agents. Readers can choose at which depth and pace they want to learn the subject, depending on their needs and background.