The monograph written by John Mullane, Ba-Ngu Vo, Martin Adams and Ba-Tuong Vo is devoted to the field of autonomous robot systems, which have been receiving a great deal of attention by the research community in the latest few years. The contents are focused on the problem of representing the environment and its uncertainty in terms of feature based maps. Random Finite Sets are adopted as the fundamental tool to represent a map, and a general framework is proposed for feature management, data association and state estimation. The approaches are tested in a number of experiments on both ground based and marine based facilities.

A practical treatment of short-range radar processing for reliable object detection at ground level.

The two-volume set (LNCS 6728 and 6729) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, ICSI 2011, held in Chongqing, China, in June 2011. The 143 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 298 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on theoretical analysis of swarm intelligence algorithms, particle swarm optimization, applications of pso algorithms, ant colony optimization algorithms, bee colony algorithms, novel swarm-based optimization algorithms, artificial immune system, differential evolution, neural networks, genetic algorithms, evolutionary computation, fuzzy methods, and hybrid algorithms - for part I. Topics addressed in part II are such as multi-objective optimization algorithms, multi-robot, swarm-robot, and multi-agent systems, data mining methods, machine learning methods, feature selection algorithms, pattern recognition methods, intelligent control, other optimization algorithms and applications, data fusion and swarm intelligence, as well as fish school search - foundations and applications.

The monograph written by John Mullane, Ba-Ngu Vo, Martin Adams and Ba-Tuong Vo is devoted to the field of autonomous robot systems, which have been receiving a great deal of attention by the research community in the latest few years. The contents are focused on the problem of representing the environment and its uncertainty in terms of feature based maps. Random Finite Sets are adopted as the fundamental tool to represent a map, and a general framework is proposed for feature management, data association and state estimation. The approaches are tested in a number of experiments on both ground based and marine based facilities.

This book includes the post-conference proceedings of the 20th RoboCup International Symposium, held in Leipzig, Germany, in July 2016. In addition to the 38 contributions to the symposium, selected from 63 submissions, the book also contains 15 champion papers of teams winning individual leagues of the RoboCup 2016 competition, the Amazon Picking Challenge, and the Harting Open Source Award. The papers present current research in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence with a special focus to robot hardware and software, environment perception, action planning and control, robot learning, multi-robot systems, and human-robot interaction.

It is man’s ongoing hope that a machine could somehow adapt to its environment by reorganizing itself. This is what the notion of self-organizing robots is based on. The theme of this book is to examine the feasibility of creating such robots within the limitations of current mechanical engineering. The topics comprise the following aspects of such a pursuit: the philosophy of design of self-organizing mechanical systems; self-organization in biological systems; the history of self-organizing mechanical systems; a case study of a self-assembling/self-repairing system as an autonomous distributed system; a self-organizing robot that can create its own shape and robotic motion; implementation and instrumentation of self-organizing robots; and the future of self-organizing robots. All topics are illustrated with many up-to-date examples, including those from the authors’ own work. The book does not require advanced knowledge of mathematics to be understood, and will be of great benefit to students in the robotics discipline, including in the areas of mechanics, control, electronics, and computer science. It is also an important source for researchers who wish to investigate the field of robotics or who have an interest in the application of self-organizing phenomena.

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.