Copyright ©2015 Zhejiang University Press, Published by Elsevier Inc. Household Service Robotics is a collection of the latest technological advances in household service robotics in five main areas: robot systems, manipulation, navigation, object recognition, and human-robot interaction. The book enables readers to understand development s and apply them to their own working areas, including: Robotic technologies for assisted living and elderly care Domestic cleaning automation Household surveillance Guiding systems for public spaces Service robotics is a highly multidisciplinary field, requiring a holistic approach. This handbook provides insights to the disciplines involved in the field as well as advanced methods and techniques that enable the scale-up of theory to actual systems. It includes coverage of functionalities such as vision systems, location control, and HCI, which are important in domestic settings. Provides a single source collection of the latest development in domestic robotic systems and control Covers vision systems, location control, and HCI, important in domestic settings Focuses on algorithms for object recognition, manipulation, human-robot interaction, and navigation for household robotics

This book provides the reader with a clear and precise description of robotics and other systems for home automation currently on the market, and discusses their interoperability and perspectives for the near future. It shows the different standards and the development platforms used by the main service robots in an international environment. This volume provides a scientific basis for the user who is looking for the best option to suit his or her needs from the available alternatives to integrate modern technology in the digital home.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Social Robotics, ICSR 2011, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in November 2011. The 23 revised full papers were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 51 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on social interaction with robots; nonverbal interaction with social robots; robots in society; social robots in education; affective interaction with social robots; robots in the home.

We feel the impact of robots on our lives more and more every day. Service robots constitute the broadest and the most exciting applications in this field, such as; personal care and assistance, agriculture, logistics, mobility, medical, and defense-oriented robots. Since service robotics contains many different types of robots, the variety of problems to be solved is also large. Many popular robotic problems, ranging from mechanism design to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), from motion planning to system security, can be examined in this context. You will find various examples and solutions for this critical area of robotics in this book. We hope that researchers interested in the subject will benefit from this book.

People have dreamed of machines, which would free them from unpleasant, dull, dirty and dangerous tasks and work for them as servants, for centuries if not millennia. Service robots seem to finally let these dreams come true. But where are all these robots that eventually serve us all day long, day for day? A few service robots have entered the market: domestic and professional cleaning robots, lawnmowers, milking robots, or entertainment robots. Some of these robots look more like toys or gadgets rather than real robots. But where is the rest? This is a question, which is asked not only by customers, but also by service providers, care organizations, politicians, and funding agencies. The answer is not very satisfying. Today’s service robots have their problems operating in everyday environments. This is by far more challenging than operating an industrial robot behind a fence. There is a comprehensive list of technical and scientific problems, which still need to be solved. To advance the state of the art in service robotics towards robots, which are capable of operating in an everyday environment, was the major objective of the DESIRE project (Deutsche Service Robotik Initiative – Germany Service Robotics Initiative) funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant no. 01IME01A. This book offers a sample of the results achieved in DESIRE.

In Robotics in Service he observes that the time is ripe for robotics to launch itself into an entirely new marketplace.

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.