Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents series) [Hardcover]

Roland Siegwart (Author), Illah R. Nourbakhsh (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 026219502X | ISBN-13: 978-0262195027 | Publication Date: March 5, 2004

Mobile robots range from the teleoperated Sojourner on the Mars Pathfinder mission to cleaning robots in the Paris Metro. Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots offers students and other interested readers an overview of the technology of mobility -- the mechanisms that allow a mobile robot to move through a real world environment to perform its tasks -- including locomotion, sensing, localization, and motion planning. It discusses all facets of mobile robotics, including hardware design, wheel design, kinematics analysis, sensors and perception, localization, mapping, and robot control architectures.The design of any successful robot involves the integration of many different disciplines, among them kinematics, signal analysis, information theory, artificial intelligence, and probability theory. Reflecting this, the book presents the techniques and technology that enable mobility in a series of interacting modules. Each chapter covers a different aspect of mobility, as the book moves from low-level to high-level details. The first two chapters explore low-level locomotory ability, examining robots' wheels and legs and the principles of kinematics. This is followed by an in-depth view of perception, including descriptions of many "off-the-shelf" sensors and an analysis of the interpretation of sensed data. The final two chapters consider the higher-level challenges of localization and cognition, discussing successful localization strategies, autonomous mapping, and navigation competence. Bringing together all aspects of mobile robotics into one volume, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots can serve as a textbook for coursework or a working tool for beginners in the field.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This book is easy to read and well organized. The idea of providing a robot functional architecture as an outline of the book, and then explaining each component in a chapter, is excellent. I think the authors have achieved their goals, and that both the beginner and the advanced student will have a clear idea of how a robot can be endowed with mobility."--Raja Chatila, LAAS - CNRS, France

"A robot is an uncertainty machine: its perception and decision-making capabilities must embed at their core the processes dealing with uncertainty. This book is an essential reference for the student, the teacher, and the researcher to understand the basics and the advanced methods of estimation theory, and the probabilistic models and processes underlying robot localization, SLAM, and decision making. A 'must have' textbook!"--Raja Chatila, LAAS - CNRS, FrancePlease note: Arrived too late to appear on book jacket.

From the Inside Flap

"This book is easy to read and well organized. The idea of providing a robot functional architecture as an outline of the book, and then explaining each component in a chapter, is excellent. I think the authors have achieved their goals, and that both the beginner and the advanced student will have a clear idea of how a robot can be endowed with mobility." --Raja Chatila, LAAS - CNRS, France

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Hardcover: 335 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (March 5, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 026219502X
• ISBN-13: 978-0262195027
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #278,054 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #50 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Theory of Computing
  • #72 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Robotics

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good guide to computational robotics, August 21, 2005

By 

calvinnme - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents series) (Hardcover)

This book is one of only a few of its kind. That is, it is a book that focuses on the computational issues in robotics rather than the all-too familiar hobbyist approach.
Chapter one is somewhat expendable, since it is simply a prosaic overview of the entire text. Chapter two talks about the theory of robot motion at a high level, with few helpful technical details. Chapter three, "Mobile Robot Kinematics", is where the book takes a dramatic upturn in quality. The computations of robot kinematics are discussed in detail for several kinds of robotic wheels. To really understand this chapter, the reader should already be familiar with dynamics and statics as well as the concepts of three dimensional rotation and matrices. For a companion to the kinematic material, I suggest Craig's "Introduction to Robotics: Mechanics and Control (3rd Edition)". It is much better than the reviewers say. Chapter four covers the various sensors used in robotics, as well as the mathematics needed in the integration of those sensors. The chapter concludes with some basic image processing and computer vision techniques. The material here is broad but somewhat shallow. I suggest that you already be familiar with basic image processing techniques and computer vision, or possibly have a copy of Gonzales & Woods "Digital Image Processing" handy, as well as a copy of Trucco & Verri's "Introductory Techniques for 3D Computer Vision". This is especially true if you wish to grasp some of the statistical techniques at the end of chapter four. Chapters five and six, on localization and navigation, respectively, are mathematically deep. The material on the Kalman Filter is somewhat oversimplified, and to truly grasp the subject of Kalman Filtering one will need to go to an outside source for a full tutorial. In my case, my instructor's notes were sufficient.
In summary, this is a very good book for someone who is mathematically mature enough to handle the computational aspects of mobile robotics. The reader should already understand dynamics, statics, numerical linear algebra, image processing, artificial intelligence, and computer vision. This book collects and connects all of these concepts well, but you will have to go digging elsewhere for the complete amount of detail required to perform all of the calculations for the methods described in this book. In short, computational robotics is a type of "capstone course" for engineers/computer scientists with the correct background and reference library, and for those engineers, this is the best guide published to date.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful Instructor's Reference, June 20, 2008

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Thaddeus A. Roppel (Auburn, AL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents series) (Hardcover)

I'm using this as my primary reference for a university course I'm teaching at the advanced senior / beginning graduate level. It is helpful in that the material is organized well, and many of the important algorithms, equations, and methods are described in adequate detail. It is by no means a textbook in the regular sense. There are no problems or student exercises. (I am generating those as I go.) Some of the sections are very well written, others seem a bit poorly edited. There are a number of typos and composition errors that are annoying. It seems that, as with so many technical works these days, no one is really "minding the store" when it comes to final publication. Nevertheless, the overall result is a good, solid reference which can serve as a starting point for generating a set of class notes. The bibliography and web links are very helpful as well. I would suggest very carefully reviewing this book before adopting it as a required textbook for a class.

0 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Interesting projects but autonomous robots is still too slow to action as atheletes!, January 7, 2010

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Kittipong Tripetch "Kan" (Nonthaburi , Thailand) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents series) (Hardcover)

I got this book 1 or 2 months ago. But I might read it only one page because I have collected at least 380 textbook in my library! But this book has some interesting issue for me at least the name of the book which is the latest research direction for robot which can be acted as human but it may be too slow to perform useful task for real human. From my recognition this book has no mathematics exercises but it may be hidden in text somewhere in the book.

I hope that sometime I might interest to read at least 1 or 2 page per day!