How a built environment that is robotic and interactive becomes an apt home to our restless, dynamic, and increasingly digital society. The relationship of humans to computers can no longer be represented as one person in a chair and one computer on a desk. Today computing finds its way into our pockets, our cars, our appliances; it is ubiquitous—an inescapable part of our everyday lives. Computing is even expanding beyond our devices; sensors, microcontrollers, and actuators are increasingly embedded into the built environment. In Architectural Robotics, Keith Evan Green looks toward the next frontier in computing: interactive, partly intelligent, meticulously designed physical environments. Green examines how these “architectural robotic” systems will support and augment us at work, school, and home, as we roam, interconnect, and age. Green tells the stories of three projects from his research lab that exemplify the reconfigurable, distributed, and transfigurable environments of architectural robotics. The Animated Work Environment is a robotic work environment of shape-shifting physical space that responds dynamically to the working life of the people within it; home+ is a suite of networked, distributed “robotic furnishings” integrated into existing domestic and healthcare environments; and LIT ROOM offers a simulated environment in which the physical space of a room merges with the imaginary space of a book, becoming “a portal to elsewhere.” How far beyond workstations, furniture, and rooms can the environments of architectural robotics stretch? Green imagines scaled-up neighborhoods, villages, and metropolises composed of physical bits, digital bytes, living things, and their hybrids. Not global but local, architectural robotics grounds computing in a capacious cyber-physical home.

Humanoid robots are highly sophisticated machines equipped with human-like sensory and motor capabilities. Today we are on the verge of a new era of rapid transformations in both science and engineering-one that brings together technological advancements in a way that will accelerate both neuroscience and robotics. Humanoid Robotics and Neuroscienc

At the dawn of the new millennium, robotics is undergoing a major transfor- tion in scope and dimension. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics is rapidly expanding into the challenges of unstructured environments. Inter- ting with, assisting, serving, and exploring with humans, the emerging robots will increasingly touch people and their lives. The goal of this new series of Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics is to bring,inatimelyfashion,thelatestadvancesanddevelopmentsinroboticsonthe basisoftheirsigni?canceandquality.Itisourhopethatthegreaterdissemination of research developments will stimulate more exchanges and collaborations among the research community and contribute to further advancement of this rapidly growing ?eld. As one of robotics pioneering symposia, ISRR, the "International Sym- sium on Robotics Research," has established over the past two decades some of the ?eld’s most fundamental and lasting contributions.With the launching of STAR, this and other thematic symposia devoted to excellence in robotics ?nd an important platform for closer links and extended reach within the research community. The Tenth edition of "Robotics Research" edited by Raymond Jarvis and AlexZelinskyoffersinits11-partvolumeacollectionofabroadrangeoftopics in robotics. The content of these contributions provides a wide coverage of the current state of robotics research: the advances and challenges in its theoretical foundation and technology basis, and the developments in its traditional and new areas of applications.

An introduction to the science and practice of autonomous robots that reviews over 300 current systems and examines the underlying technology. Autonomous robots are intelligent machines capable of performing tasks in the world by themselves, without explicit human control. Examples range from autonomous helicopters to Roomba, the robot vacuum cleaner. In this book, George Bekey offers an introduction to the science and practice of autonomous robots that can be used both in the classroom and as a reference for industry professionals. He surveys the hardware implementations of more than 300 current systems, reviews some of their application areas, and examines the underlying technology, including control, architectures, learning, manipulation, grasping, navigation, and mapping. Living systems can be considered the prototypes of autonomous systems, and Bekey explores the biological inspiration that forms the basis of many recent developments in robotics. He also discusses robot control issues and the design of control architectures. After an overview of the field that introduces some of its fundamental concepts, the book presents background material on hardware, control (from both biological and engineering perspectives), software architecture, and robot intelligence. It then examines a broad range of implementations and applications, including locomotion (wheeled, legged, flying, swimming, and crawling robots), manipulation (both arms and hands), localization, navigation, and mapping. The many case studies and specific applications include robots built for research, industry, and the military, among them underwater robotic vehicles, walking machines with four, six, and eight legs, and the famous humanoid robots Cog, Kismet, ASIMO, and QRIO. The book concludes with reflections on the future of robotics—the potential benefits as well as the possible dangers that may arise from large numbers of increasingly intelligent and autonomous robots.

At the dawn of the new millennium, robotics is undergoing a major transfor- tion in scope and dimension. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics is rapidly expanding into the challenges of unstructured environments. Inter- ting with, assisting, serving, and exploring with humans, the emerging robots will increasingly touch people and their lives. The goal of this new series of Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics is to bring,inatimelyfashion,thelatestadvancesanddevelopmentsinroboticsonthe basisoftheirsigni?canceandquality.Itisourhopethatthegreaterdissemination of research developments will stimulate more exchanges and collaborations among the research community and contribute to further advancement of this rapidly growing ?eld. As one of robotics pioneering symposia, ISRR, the "International Sym- sium on Robotics Research," has established over the past two decades some of the ?eld’s most fundamental and lasting contributions.With the launching of STAR, this and other thematic symposia devoted to excellence in robotics ?nd an important platform for closer links and extended reach within the research community. The Tenth edition of "Robotics Research" edited by Raymond Jarvis and AlexZelinskyoffersinits11-partvolumeacollectionofabroadrangeoftopics in robotics. The content of these contributions provides a wide coverage of the current state of robotics research: the advances and challenges in its theoretical foundation and technology basis, and the developments in its traditional and new areas of applications.

The role of robots in society keeps expanding and diversifying, bringing with it a host of issues surrounding the relationship between robots and humans. This introduction to human–robot interaction (HRI) by leading researchers in this developing field is the first to provide a broad overview of the multidisciplinary topics central to modern HRI research. Written for students and researchers from robotics, artificial intelligence, psychology, sociology, and design, it presents the basics of how robots work, how to design them, and how to evaluate their performance. Self-contained chapters discuss a wide range of topics, including speech and language, nonverbal communication, and processing emotions, plus an array of applications and the ethical issues surrounding them. This revised and expanded second edition includes a new chapter on how people perceive robots, coverage of recent developments in robotic hardware, software, and artificial intelligence, and exercises for readers to test their knowledge.