By the dawn of the new millennium, robotics has undergone a major transformation in scope and dimensions. This expansion has been brought about by the maturity of the field and the advances in its related technologies. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics has been rapidly expanding into the challenges of the human world. The new generation of robots is expected to safely and dependably co-habitat with humans in homes, workplaces, and communities, providing support in services, entertainment, education, healthcare, manufacturing, and assistance. Beyond its impact on physical robots, the body of knowledge robotics has produced is revealing a much wider range of applications reaching across diverse research areas and scientific disciplines, such as: biomechanics, haptics, neurosciences, virtual simulation, animation, surgery, and sensor networks among others. In return, the challenges of the new emerging areas are proving an abundant source of stimulation and insights for the field of robotics. It is indeed at the intersection of disciplines that the most striking advances happen. The goal of the series of Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR) is to bring, in a timely fashion, the latest advances and developments in robotics on the basis of their significance and quality. It is our hope that the wider dissemination of research developments will stimulate more exchanges and collaborations among the research community and contribute to further advancement of this rapidly growing field.

The IAVSD Symposium is the leading international conference in the field of ground vehicle dynamics, bringing together scientists and engineers from academia and industry. The biennial IAVSD symposia have been held in internationally renowned locations. In 2015 the 24th Symposium of the International Association for Vehicle System Dynamics (IAVSD)

The AVEC symposium is a leading international conference in the fields of vehicle dynamics and advanced vehicle control, bringing together scientists and engineers from academia and automotive industry. The first symposium was held in 1992 in Yokohama, Japan. Since then, biennial AVEC symposia have been established internationally and have considerably contributed to the progress of technology in automotive research and development. In 2016 the 13th International Symposium on Advanced Vehicle Control (AVEC’16) was held in Munich, Germany, from 13th to 16th of September 2016. The symposium was hosted by the Munich University of Applied Sciences. AVEC’16 puts a special focus on automatic driving, autonomous driving functions and driver assist systems, integrated control of interacting control systems, controlled suspension systems, active wheel torque distribution, and vehicle state and parameter estimation. 132 papers were presented at the symposium and are published in these proceedings as full paper contributions. The papers review the latest research developments and practical applications in highly relevant areas of vehicle control, and may serve as a reference for researchers and engineers.

Millions of automobile accidents occur worldwide each year. Some of the most serious are rear-end crashes, side crashes within intersections, and crashes that occur when cars change lanes or drift into a lane. The holy grail of traffic safety is to avoid automobile accidents altogether. To that end, major automakers, governments, and universities are working on systems that allow vehicles to communicate with one another as well as the surrounding infrastructure (V2V/V2I for short). These systems show promise for such functions as intersection assist, left-turn assist, do-not-pass warning, advance warning of a vehicle braking ahead, forward-collision warning, and blind-spot/lane-change warning. This compendium explores the challenges in developing these systems and provides the latest developments in V2V/V2I technology. It begins with a series of overview news stories and articles from SAE’s magazines on the progress in this technology. This is followed by a series of technical papers on V2V/V2I dealing with the many technical aspects of design of these systems as well as discussions of such key issues as the need for extreme reliability assurances and traffic congestion overloads on the systems. Some of most interesting discussions in the book include: • Overview of a large-scale test in Germany to address reliability. • Effectiveness of different antennas and receivers that are used in various intersections settings, such as intersections where there are tall buildings or no buildings, and where high transmission power lines are located that can cause signal interference. • Various ways to communicate between vehicles and how messages are relayed to drivers. • Dedicated short range communication protocol for vehicle safety applications, which shows promise for combining and processing large amounts of information. Editor Ronald K. Jurgen prepared this book to be of use to engineers at automakers and electronic component suppliers; software engineers; computer systems analysts and architects; academics and researchers within the electronics, computing, and automotive industries; legislators, managers and other decision-makers in the government highway sector; traffic safety professionals; and insurance and legal practitioners. Mr. Jurgen served on the editorial staff of IEEE Spectrum for 30 years and is the editor of several electronics-related handbooks and several other electronics-related compendiums published by SAE International.

This book includes significant recent research on robotic algorithms. It has been written by leading experts in the field. The 15th Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR) was held on June 22–24, 2022, at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland. Each chapter represents an exciting state-of-the-art development in robotic algorithms that was presented at this 15th incarnation of WAFR. Different chapters combine ideas from a wide variety of fields, spanning and combining planning (for tasks, paths, motion, navigation, coverage, and patrol), computational geometry and topology, control theory, machine learning, formal methods, game theory, information theory, and theoretical computer science. Many of these papers explore new and interesting problems and problem variants that include human–robot interaction, planning and reasoning under uncertainty, dynamic environments, distributed decision making, multi-agent coordination, and heterogeneity.

Provides an up-to-date, in-depth look at the current research, design, and implementation of cooperative vehicle safety communication protocols and technology Improving traffic safety has been a top concern for transportation agencies around the world and the focus of heavy research and development efforts sponsored by both governments and private industries. Cooperative vehicle systems—which use sensors and wireless technologies to reduce traffic accidents—can play a major role in making the world's roads safer. Vehicle Safety Communications: Protocols, Security, and Privacy describes fundamental issues in cooperative vehicle safety and recent advances in technologies for enabling cooperative vehicle safety. It gives an overview of traditional vehicle safety issues, the evolution of vehicle safety technologies, and the need for cooperative systems where vehicles work together to reduce the number of crashes or mitigate damage when crashes become unavoidable. Authored by two top industry professionals, the book: Summarizes the history and current status of 5.9 GHz Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) technology and standardization, discussing key issues in applying DSRC to support cooperative vehicle safety Features an in-depth overview of on-board equipment (OBE) and roadside equipment (RSE) by describing sample designs to illustrate the key issues and potential solutions Takes on security and privacy protection requirements and challenges, including how to design privacy-preserving digital certificate management systems and how to evict misbehaving vehicles Includes coverage of vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications like intersection collision avoidance applications and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications like extended electronic brake lights and intersection movement assist Vehicle Safety Communications is ideal for anyone working in the areas of—or studying—cooperative vehicle safety and vehicle communications.

This book presents the results of the successful Sensors Special Issue on Intelligent Vehicles that received submissions between March 2019 and May 2020. The Guest Editors of this Special Issue are Dr. David Fernández-Llorca, Dr. Ignacio Parra-Alonso, Dr. Iván García-Daza and Dr. Noelia Parra-Alonso, all from the Computer Engineering Department at the University of Alcalá (Madrid, Spain). A total of 32 manuscripts were finally accepted between 2019 and 2020, presented by top researchers from all over the world. The reader will find a well-representative set of current research and developments related to sensors and sensing for intelligent vehicles. The topics of the published manuscripts can be grouped into seven main categories: (1) assistance systems and automatic vehicle operation, (2) vehicle positioning and localization, (3) fault diagnosis and fail-x systems, (4) perception and scene understanding, (5) smart regenerative braking systems for electric vehicles, (6) driver behavior modeling and (7) intelligent sensing. We, the Guest Editors, hope that the readers will find this book to contain interesting papers for their research, papers that they will enjoy reading as much as we have enjoyed organizing this Special Issue