Customer Reviews

Behavior-Based Robotics (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The first thing to realize is this book is a survery of Behavioral Robotics. It does a great job of explaining the various aspects of Beharioral methology, but it is not a colledge textbook. There aren't sets of problems, but there is a whole lot of basic knowledge. I don't have a lot of AI experience, but I was never at a lost reading this book. The book is a great starting point to learn the field. When you finish the book you will have a basic understanding of the different branches of the field, and the Bibliography is truly top notch. With this book you will know which method will best suit you task.

The only reason I am giving this book three stars is that no other serious publication I know of discusses behavior based robotics. However, that being said, this book uses a lot of pages and costs a lot of dollars to explain a rather simple concept. It is an elegant concept, and I do take my hat off to Mr. Arkin for getting to the heart of the matter clearly and with good illustrations. But is it a concept that requires almost 500 pages? I don't really think so. Simply put, behavior-based robotics does not use an internal model of its environment. For instance, there is no programming in the robot of what a chair looks like, or what kind of surface the robot is moving on - all the information is gleaned from the input of the robot's sensors. The robot uses that information to react to the changes in its environment as those changes occur. State machines are at the heart of the design of any behavior-based robot. For example, a foraging robot would probably have four states describing its behavior in response to its sensors: wandering and looking for food, picking up food, homing towards the nest, and avoiding obstacles.
This book is a very easy read, although at times it seems repetitive. It does not really require any particular technical background in order to understand it, although to really appreciate the concept you should already be familiar with robotic design concepts.
Some really good implementations of the concepts in this book are at a website authored by Craig Reynolds. To find it, type "Steering behaviors for autonomous characters" into Google, and it should be the first address listed. Mr. Reynolds' site has a paper on his extensions of behavior-based concepts, as well as some Java applets demonstrating his methods.

Outstanding introduction to the field of behaviour-based robot control. Completely accessible to the non-expert. It starts off with a good treatment of perception and action in animals as motivation. Goes on to discuss different aspects of behavioural control, including formal methods, architectures, various implementations, theoretical limitations, and so on.

I use this book as a reference, to help me with my own research into control architectures. Arkin is a leader in this field. Many (most!) of the recent research papers that I've seen cite this book. I think it should be on your bookshelf if you're a researcher or practitioner of AI.

From reading this text, it is unclear whether it set out to be a review of or an introduction to behavior based robotics. Although it discusses some the most important and popular work in behavior based AI from the past 20 years, the coverage of these subjects is quite weak. Many pages are devoted to explaining the obvious or irrelevant in excruciating detail. This text is lacking in substance and is definitely not worth its...price tag.

This book has a very good organization and explanation of what is conceived as Behavior-based Robotics (BBR). Not only with the good theoretical explanations along with the real examples, but also for settling down into engineering research what is mostly a philosofical approach.

Excellent for standarizing, nomenclatures, and complete fundament on BBR research and works.

If anything bad can be said is the 10-years old fact, and the lack of techniques such as ANFIS and other cooperative control strategies for multiple robots.

Nous utilisons ce livre dans le but de concevoir la nouvelle intelligence de notre robot autonome (capra.etsmtl.ca). Ce livre est parfaitement bien structuré afin de bien comprendre le cheminement mental que nous devons avoir afin de développer ce concept. Il n'y a pas d'exemple directement lié à du code, mais jumelé à un livre d'exercice sur le behavior-based il vous permet une compréhension complète de bahavior-based et de son implémentation.