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Robot Motion Control 2011 presents very recent results in robot motion and control. Forty short papers have been chosen from those presented at the sixth International Workshop on Robot Motion and Control held in Poland in June 2011. The authors of these papers have been carefully selected and represent leading institutions in this field. The following recent developments are discussed: Design of trajectory planning schemes for holonomic and nonholonomic systems with optimization of energy, torque limitations and other factors. New control algorithms for industrial robots, nonholonomic systems and legged robots. Different applications of robotic systems in industry and everyday life, like medicine, education, entertainment and others. Multiagent systems consisting of mobile and flying robots with their applications The book is suitable for graduate students of automation and robotics, informatics and management, mechatronics, electronics and production engineering systems as well as scientists and researchers working in these fields.

This book presents the recent research advances in linear and nonlinear control techniques. From both a theoretical and practical standpoint, motion planning and related control challenges are key parts of robotics. Indeed, the literature on the planning of geometric paths and the generation of time-based trajectories, while accounting for the compatibility of such paths and trajectories with the kinematic and dynamic constraints of a manipulator or a mobile vehicle, is extensive and rich in historical references. Path planning is vital and critical for many different types of robotics, including autonomous vehicles, multiple robots, and robot arms. In the case of multiple robot route planning, it is critical to produce a safe path that avoids colliding with objects or other robots. When designing a safe path for an aerial or underwater robot, the 3D environment must be considered. As the number of degrees of freedom on a robot arm increases, so does the difficulty of path planning. As a result, safe pathways for high-dimensional systems must be developed in a timely manner. Nonetheless, modern robotic applications, particularly those requiring one or more robots to operate in a dynamic environment (e.g., human–robot collaboration and physical interaction, surveillance, or exploration of unknown spaces with mobile agents, etc.), pose new and exciting challenges to researchers and practitioners. For instance, planning a robot's motion in a dynamic environment necessitates the real-time and online execution of difficult computational operations. The development of efficient solutions for such real-time computations, which could be offered by specially designed computational architectures, optimized algorithms, and other unique contributions, is thus a critical step in the advancement of present and future-oriented robotics.

Using a designed vector field to guide robots to follow a given geometric desired path has found a range of practical applications, such as underwater pipeline inspection, warehouse navigation, and highway traffic monitoring. It is thus in great need to build a rigorous theory to guide practical implementations with formal guarantees. It is even so when multiple robots are required to follow predefined desired paths or maneuver on surfaces and coordinate their motions to efficiently accomplish repetitive and laborious tasks. The book introduces guiding vector fields on Euclidean spaces and Riemannian manifolds for single-robot and multi-robot path-following and motion coordination, provides rigorous theoretical guarantees of vector field guided motion control of robotic systems, and elaborates on the practical implementation of the proposed algorithms on mobile wheeled robots and fixed-wing aircraft. It provides guidelines for the robust, reliable, and safe practical implementations for robotic tasks, including path-following navigation, obstacle-avoidance, and multi-robot motion coordination. In particular, the book reveals fundamental theoretic underpinnings of guiding vector fields and applies to addressing various robot motion control problems. Notably, it answers many crucial and challenging questions such as: · How to generate a general guiding vector field on any n-dimensional Riemannian manifold for robot motion control tasks? · Do singular points always exist in a general guiding vector field? · How to generate a guiding vector field that is free of singular points? · How to design control algorithms based on guiding vector fields for different robot motion control tasks including path-following, obstacle-avoidance, and multi-robot distributed motion coordination? Answering these questions has led to the discovery of fundamental assumptions, a “topological surgery” to create a singularity-free guiding vector field, a robot navigation algorithm with the global convergence property, a provably safe collision-avoidance algorithm and an effective distributed motion control algorithm, etc

Computer simulation of high-cost applications, especially those involving massive amounts of robotic equipment, is much more efficient than traditional laboratory means. This new textbook presents procedures that make an important contribution to the effective use of automated manufacturing. It also uses a unique combination of computer and robot skills to achieve solutions to the problems discussed throughout the text. Methods of utilizing existing simulation software are emphasized since this enables students to create workable robot designs through a better understanding of basic simulation techniques. Robotic Simulation is designed for introductory courses in simulation. For short courses or seminars, the chapters dealing with hardware-dependent applications can easily be omitted without interfering with the continuity of the text. The book's computerized simulation approach to robotics is an indispensable supplement to the normal methods taught in a course on robots.