From driving, flying, and swimming, to digging for unknown objects in space exploration, autonomous robots take on varied shapes and sizes. In part, autonomous robots are designed to perform tasks that are too dirty, dull, or dangerous for humans. With nontrivial autonomy and volition, they may soon claim their own place in human society. These robots will be our allies as we strive for understanding our natural and man-made environments and build positive synergies around us. Although we may never perfect replication of biological capabilities in robots, we must harness the inevitable emergence of robots that synchronizes with our own capacities to live, learn, and grow. This book is a snapshot of motivations and methodologies for our collective attempts to transform our lives and enable us to cohabit with robots that work with and for us. It reviews and guides the reader to seminal and continual developments that are the foundations for successful paradigms. It attempts to demystify the abilities and limitations of robots. It is a progress report on the continuing work that will fuel future endeavors. Table of Contents: Part I: Preliminaries/Agency, Motion, and Anatomy/Behaviors / Architectures / Affect/Sensors / Manipulators/Part II: Mobility/Potential Fields/Roadmaps / Reactive Navigation / Multi-Robot Mapping: Brick and Mortar Strategy / Part III: State of the Art / Multi-Robotics Phenomena / Human-Robot Interaction / Fuzzy Control / Decision Theory and Game Theory / Part IV: On the Horizon / Applications: Macro and Micro Robots / References / Author Biography / Discussion

Shared Memory Application Programming presents the key concepts and applications of parallel programming, in an accessible and engaging style applicable to developers across many domains. Multithreaded programming is today a core technology, at the basis of all software development projects in any branch of applied computer science. This book guides readers to develop insights about threaded programming and introduces two popular platforms for multicore development: OpenMP and Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB). Author Victor Alessandrini leverages his rich experience to explain each platform's design strategies, analyzing the focus and strengths underlying their often complementary capabilities, as well as their interoperability. The book is divided into two parts: the first develops the essential concepts of thread management and synchronization, discussing the way they are implemented in native multithreading libraries (Windows threads, Pthreads) as well as in the modern C++11 threads standard. The second provides an in-depth discussion of TBB and OpenMP including the latest features in OpenMP 4.0 extensions to ensure readers' skills are fully up to date. Focus progressively shifts from traditional thread parallelism to modern task parallelism deployed by modern programming environments. Several chapter include examples drawn from a variety of disciplines, including molecular dynamics and image processing, with full source code and a software library incorporating a number of utilities that readers can adapt into their own projects. - Designed to introduce threading and multicore programming to teach modern coding strategies for developers in applied computing - Leverages author Victor Alessandrini's rich experience to explain each platform's design strategies, analyzing the focus and strengths underlying their often complementary capabilities, as well as their interoperability - Includes complete, up-to-date discussions of OpenMP 4.0 and TBB - Based on the author's training sessions, including information on source code and software libraries which can be repurposed

The second edition of The Boost C++ Libraries introduces 72 Boost libraries that provide a wide range of useful capabilities. They help you manage memory and process strings more easily. They provide containers and other data structures that go well beyond what the standard library offers. They make it easy to build platform-independent network applications. Simply put, these 72 libraries greatly expand your C++ toolbox. The second edition contains more than 430 examples. All examples are as short as possible, but they are complete, so you can compile and run them as is. They show you what the Boost libraries offer and give you a head start on using the libraries in your own applications. The goal of this book is to increase your efficiency as a C++ developer and to simplify software development with C++. The Boost libraries introduced in this book will help you write less code with fewer bugs and finish projects faster. You code will be more concise and self-explanatory and more easily adapted when requirements change. The second edition is based on the Boost libraries 1.55.0 and 1.56.0 with the latter version having been released in August 2014. The examples are based on C++11 and have been tested with Visual Studio 2013, GCC 4.8 and Clang 3.3 on various platforms. For Boost libraries which were incorporated into the C++11 standard library, differences between Boost and the standard library are highlighted. The Boost libraries are one of the most important and influential open source C++ libraries. Their source code is available under a permissive free software license. Several Boost libraries have been incorporated into the C++11 standard library. The Boost libraries are developed and supported by the Boost community - a worldwide developer community with a strong interest in pushing C++ boundaries further.

Real-time computing systems are vital to a wide range of applications. For example, they are used in the control of nuclear reactors and automated manufacturing facilities, in controlling and tracking air traffic, and in communication systems. In recent years, real-time systems have also grown larger and become more critical. For instance, advanced aircraft such as the space shuttle must depend heavily on computer sys tems [Carlow 84]. The centralized control of manufacturing facilities and assembly plants operated by robots are other examples at the heart of which lie embedded real-time systems. Military defense systems deployed in the air, on the ocean surface, land and underwater, have also been increasingly relying upon real-time systems for monitoring and operational safety purposes, and for retaliatory and containment measures. In telecommunications and in multi-media applications, real time characteristics are essential to maintain the integrity of transmitted data, audio and video signals. Many of these systems control, monitor or perform critical operations, and must respond quickly to emergency events in a wide range of embedded applications. They are therefore required to process tasks with stringent timing requirements and must perform these tasks in a way that these timing requirements are guaranteed to be met. Real-time scheduling al gorithms attempt to ensure that system timing behavior meets its specifications, but typically assume that tasks do not share logical or physical resources. Since resource-sharing cannot be eliminated, synchronization primitives must be used to ensure that resource consis tency constraints are not violated.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Dr. Lenoski and Dr. Weber have experience with leading-edge research and practical issues involved in implementing large-scale parallel systems. They were key contributors to the architecture and design of the DASH multiprocessor. Currently, they are involved with commercializing scalable shared-memory technology.

Software -- Operating Systems.