Mobile Spatial

Master RealityKit, ARKit, SwiftUI and AI frameworks, in preparation for the next 'iPhone moment'.

This book describes how robots can make sense of motion in their surroundings and use the patterns they observe to blend in better in dynamic environments shared with humans.The world around us is constantly changing. Nonetheless, we can find our way and aren’t overwhelmed by all the buzz, since motion often follows discernible patterns. Just like humans, robots need to understand the patterns behind the dynamics in their surroundings to be able to efficiently operate e.g. in a busy airport.

This volume includes studies that examine the issue of spatial variability in four areas of the environmental sciences – atmospheric science, geological science, biological science, and landscape science.

The study of what can be computed by a team of autonomous mobile robots, originally started in robotics and AI, has become increasingly popular in theoretical computer science (especially in distributed computing), where it is now an integral part of the investigations on computability by mobile entities. The robots are identical computational entities located and able to move in a spatial universe; they operate without explicit communication and are usually unable to remember the past; they are extremely simple, with limited resources, and individually quite weak. However, collectively the robots are capable of performing complex tasks, and form a system with desirable fault-tolerant and self-stabilizing properties. The research has been concerned with the computational aspects of such systems. In particular, the focus has been on the minimal capabilities that the robots should have in order to solve a problem.

This book brings together the fields of robot spatial mapping and cognitive spatial mapping, which share some common core problems. One would reasonably expect some cross-fertilisations of research between the two areas to have occurred, and this has happened but only recently. There are signs that both fields have matured and that efforts to cross-fertilise are happening, but it is neither complete nor common yet.