Mon Ami Robot

Robotics is now a well established field of endeavour both in industry and research laboratories. There is a danger that the word may be widely in areas where it is inappropriate, so knowing precisely what used even a robot is, how it is controlled and how it may be used in specific applications is of the highest importance. The authors are not only innovators in the development of robots but also highly respected educators. This book has been carefully com­ piled to crystallize, for the reader, the fundamentals of robot operation and application. The material carefully treads its path between achieving broad coverage and depth where it is needed. Industrialists, teachers and students alike will benefit from the book. Igor Aleksander July 1983 Chapter 1 Robotics: an introduction As a result of the great advances of the last few years many industrial processes have become largely automated, with the human operator playing an ever decreasing role. The fully automated and unmanned factory is probably now only a few decades away.

This book presents the most recent research advances in the theory, design, control and application of robotic systems, which are intended for a variety of purposes such as manipulation, manufacturing, automation, surgery, locomotion and biomechanics. The issues addressed are fundamentally kinematic in nature, including synthesis, calibration, redundancy, force control, dexterity, inverse and forward kinematics, kinematic singularities, as well as over-constrained systems.

One of the ultimate goals in Robotics is to create autonomous robots. Such robots will accept high-level descriptions of tasks and will execute them without further human intervention. The input descriptions will specify what the user wants done rather than how to do it. The robots will be any kind of versatile mechanical device equipped with actuators and sensors under the control of a computing system. Making progress toward autonomous robots is of major practical inter­ est in a wide variety of application domains including manufacturing, construction, waste management, space exploration, undersea work, as­ sistance for the disabled, and medical surgery. It is also of great technical interest, especially for Computer Science, because it raises challenging and rich computational issues from which new concepts of broad useful­ ness are likely to emerge. Developing the technologies necessary for autonomous robots is a formidable undertaking with deep interweaved ramifications in auto­ mated reasoning, perception and control. It raises many important prob­ lems. One of them - motion planning - is the central theme of this book. It can be loosely stated as follows: How can a robot decide what motions to perform in order to achieve goal arrangements of physical objects? This capability is eminently necessary since, by definition, a robot accomplishes tasks by moving in the real world. The minimum one would expect from an autonomous robot is the ability to plan its x Preface own motions.

These volumes of "Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing" highlight papers presented at the "Third Iberian Robotics Conference (ROBOT 2017)". Held from 22 to 24 November 2017 in Seville, Spain, the conference is a part of a series of conferences co-organized by SEIDROB (Spanish Society for Research and Development in Robotics) and SPR (Portuguese Society for Robotics).

Extraordinary innovations in technology promise to transform the world, but how realistic is the claim that AI will change our lives? In this much needed book the acclaimed economist Roger Bootle responds to the fascinating economic questions posed by the age of the robot, steering a path away from tech jargon and alarmism towards a rational explanation of the ways in which the AI revolution will affect us all. Tackling the implications of Artificial Intelligence on growth, productivity, inflation and the distribution of wealth and power, THE AI ECONOMY also examines coming changes to the the way we educate, work and spend our leisure time.