This book constitutes the thorougly refereed post-proceedings of an international workshop on sensor based Intelligent Robot held in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany in September/October 1998. The 17 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed for inclusion in the book. Among the topics addressed are robot navigation, motion planning, autonomous mobile robots, wheelchair robots, interactive robots, car navigation systems, visual tracking, sensor based navigation, distributed algorithms, computer vision, intelligent agents, robot control, and computational geometry.

Robotics is a highly interdisciplinary research topic, that requires integration of methods for mechanics, control engineering, signal processing, planning, gra- ics, human-computer interaction, real-time systems, applied mathematics, and software engineering to enable construction of fully operational systems. The diversity of topics needed to design, implement, and deploy such systems implies that it is almost impossible for individual teams to provide the needed critical mass for such endeavors. To facilitate interaction and progress on sensor-based intelligent robotics inter-disciplinary workshops are necessary through which - depthdiscussioncanbeusedforcrossdisseminationbetweendi?erentdisciplines. The Dagstuhl foundation has organized a number of workshops on Mod- ing and Integration of Sensor Based Intelligent Robot Systems. The Dagstuhl seminars take place over a full week in a beautiful setting in the Saarland in Germany. The setting provides an ideal environment for in-depth presentations and rich interaction between the participants. This volume contains papers presented during the fourth workshop held - tober 15–20, 2000. All papers were submitted by workshop attendees, and were reviewed by at least one reviewer. We wish to thank all of the reviewers for their invaluable help in making this a high-quality selection of papers. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Schloss Dagstuhl Foundation and the sta? at Springer-Verlag. Without their support the production of this volume would not have been possible.

This edited and reviewed volume consists of papers that were originally presented at a workshop in the Scientific Center at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany. It gives an overview of the field and presents the latest developments in the areas of modeling and planning for sensor based robots. The particular topics addressed include active vision, sensor fusion, environment modeling, motion planning, robot navigation, distributed control architectures, reactive behavior, and others.

Rapid advances in sensors, computers, and algorithms continue to fuel dramatic improvements in intelligent robots. In addition, robot vehicles are starting to appear in a number of applications. For example, they have been installed in public settings to perform such tasks as delivering items in hospitals and cleaning floors in supermarkets; recently, two small robot vehicles were launched to explore Mars.This book presents the latest advances in the principal fields that contribute to robotics. It contains contributions written by leading experts addressing topics such as Path and Motion Planning, Navigation and Sensing, Vision and Object Recognition, Environment Modeling, and others.

The author compiles everything a student or experienced developmental engineer needs to know about the supporting technologies associated with the rapidly evolving field of robotics.From the table of contents: Design Considerations * Dead Reckoning * Odometry Sensors * Doppler and Inertial Navigation * Typical Mobility Configurations * Tactile and

This book describes recent work on active sensors for mobile robots. An active sensor interacts with its surroundings to supply data on demand for a particular function, gathering and abstracting information according to need rather than acting as a generic data gatherer. Details of the physical operation are hidden.The book deals mainly with active range sensors, which provide rapid information for local planning, describing extraction of two-dimensional features such as lines, corners and cylinders to reconstruct a plan of a building. It is structured according to the physical principles of the sensors, since to a large extent these determine the function of the sensors and the methods of processing. Recent work using sonar, optoelectronic sensors and radar is described. Sections on vision and on sensor management develop the idea of software adaptation for efficient operation in a changing environment.

A multiplicity of techniques and angles of attack are incorporated in 18 contributions describing recent developments in the structure, architecture, programming, control, and implementation of industrial robots capable of performing intelligent action and decision making. Annotation copyright Book

The CISM-IFToMM Symposia have played a dynamic role in the development of the theory and practice of robotics. The proceedings of the Tenth Symposia present a world view to date of the state-of-the-art, including a unique record of the results achieved in central and eastern Europe.

Robotic welding systems have been used in different types of manufacturing. They can provide several benefits in welding applications. The most prominent advantages of robotic welding are precision and productivity. Another benefit is that labor costs can be reduced. Robotic welding also reduces risk by moving the human welder/operator away from hazardous fumes and molten metal close to the welding arc. The robotic welding system usually involves measuring and identifying the component to be welded, we- ing it in position, controlling the welding parameters and documenting the produced welds. However, traditional robotic welding systems rely heavily upon human interv- tion. It does not seem that the traditional robotic welding techniques by themselves can cope well with uncertainties in the welding surroundings and conditions, e. g. variation of weld pool dynamics, fluxion, solid, weld torch, and etc. On the other hand, the advent of intelligent techniques provides us with a powerful tool for solving demanding re- world problems with uncertain and unpredictable environments. Therefore, it is intere- ing to gather current trends and to provide a high quality forum for engineers and researchers working in the filed of intelligent techniques for robotic welding systems. This volume brings together a broad range of invited and contributed papers that describe recent progress in this field.