By the dawn of the new millennium, robotics has undergone a major transformation in scope and dimensions. This expansion has been brought about by the maturity of the field and the advances in its related technologies. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics has been rapidly expanding into the challenges of the human world. The new generation of robots is expected to safely and dependably co-habitat with humans in homes, workplaces, and communities, providing support in services, entertainment, education, healthcare, manufacturing, and assistance. Beyond its impact on physical robots, the body of knowledge robotics has produced is revealing a much wider range of applications reaching across diverse research areas and scientific disciplines, such as: biomechanics, haptics, neurosciences, virtual simulation, animation, surgery, and sensor networks among others. In return, the challenges of the new emerging areas are proving an abundant source of stimulation and insights for the field of robotics. It is indeed at the intersection of disciplines that the most striking advances happen. The goal of the series of Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR) is to bring, in a timely fashion, the latest advances and developments in robotics on the basis of their significance and quality. It is our hope that the wider dissemination of research developments will stimulate more exchanges and collaborations among the research community and contribute to further advancement of this rapidly growing field.

Experience from the DARPA Urban Challenge provides details of the types of systems, software and processes that were used to develop the complex unmanned vehicles that participated in the DARPA Urban Challenge. The vehicle developers explain how autonomous vehicle software in this race was designed and implemented. The chapters range from system and software architecture, navigation, path planning, steering, perception, engineering autonomous systems, and testing and performance evaluation. This book is based on papers from entrants in the Urban Challenge. The content is broken into five parts: an introduction to the DARPA Urban Challenge; systems and software architectures; navigation; control and sensors; and development and test. Experience from the DARPA Urban Challenge provides graduate students in robotics and engineering professionals with an insight into multiple ways of approaching the development of autonomous vehicles.

The DARPA Grand Challenge was a landmark in the field of robotics: a race by autonomous vehicles through 132 miles of rough Nevada terrain. It showcased exciting and unprecedented capabilities in robotic perception, navigation, and control. The event took place in October 2005 and drew teams of competitors from academia and industry, as well as many garage hobbyists. This book presents fifteen technical papers that describe each team's driverless vehicle, race strategy, and insights. As a whole, they present the state of the art in autonomous vehicle technology and offer a glimpse of future technology for tomorrow’s driverless cars.

The DARPA Robotics Challenge was a robotics competition that took place in Pomona, California USA in June 2015. The competition was the culmination of 33 months of demanding work by 23 teams and required humanoid robots to perform challenging locomotion and manipulation tasks in a mock disaster site. The challenge was conceived as a response to the Japanese Fukushima nuclear disaster of March 2011. The Fukushima disaster was seen as an ideal candidate for robotic intervention since the risk of exposure to radiation prevented human responders from accessing the site. This volume, edited by Matthew Spenko, Stephen Buerger, and Karl Iagnemma, includes commentary by the organizers, overall analysis of the results, and documentation of the technical efforts of 15 competing teams. The book provides an important record of the successes and failures involved in the DARPA Robotics Challenge and provides guidance for future needs to be addressed by policy makers, funding agencies, and the robotics research community. Many of the papers in this volume were initially published in a series of special issues of the Journal of Field Robotics. We have proudly collected versions of those papers in this STAR volume.

This report describes Team Caltech's technical approach and results for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Our primary technical thrusts were in three areas: (1) mission and contingency management for autonomous systems; (2) distributed sensor fusion, mapping and situational awareness; and (3) optimization-based guidance, navigation and control. Our autonomous vehicle, Alice, demonstrated new capabilities in each of these areas and drove approximate 300 autonomous miles in preparation for the race. The vehicle completed 2 of the 3 qualification tests, but did not ultimately qualify for the race due to poor performance in the merging tests at the National Qualifying Event.

The automotive industry appears close to substantial change engendered by “self-driving” technologies. This technology offers the possibility of significant benefits to social welfare—saving lives; reducing crashes, congestion, fuel consumption, and pollution; increasing mobility for the disabled; and ultimately improving land use. This report is intended as a guide for state and federal policymakers on the many issues that this technology raises.

An introduction to the techniques and algorithms of the newest field in robotics. Probabilistic robotics is a new and growing area in robotics, concerned with perception and control in the face of uncertainty. Building on the field of mathematical statistics, probabilistic robotics endows robots with a new level of robustness in real-world situations. This book introduces the reader to a wealth of techniques and algorithms in the field. All algorithms are based on a single overarching mathematical foundation. Each chapter provides example implementations in pseudo code, detailed mathematical derivations, discussions from a practitioner's perspective, and extensive lists of exercises and class projects. The book's Web site, www.probabilistic-robotics.org, has additional material. The book is relevant for anyone involved in robotic software development and scientific research. It will also be of interest to applied statisticians and engineers dealing with real-world sensor data.

This book takes a look at fully automated, autonomous vehicles and discusses many open questions: How can autonomous vehicles be integrated into the current transportation system with diverse users and human drivers? Where do automated vehicles fall under current legal frameworks? What risks are associated with automation and how will society respond to these risks? How will the marketplace react to automated vehicles and what changes may be necessary for companies? Experts from Germany and the United States define key societal, engineering, and mobility issues related to the automation of vehicles. They discuss the decisions programmers of automated vehicles must make to enable vehicles to perceive their environment, interact with other road users, and choose actions that may have ethical consequences. The authors further identify expectations and concerns that will form the basis for individual and societal acceptance of autonomous driving. While the safety benefits of such vehicles are tremendous, the authors demonstrate that these benefits will only be achieved if vehicles have an appropriate safety concept at the heart of their design. Realizing the potential of automated vehicles to reorganize traffic and transform mobility of people and goods requires similar care in the design of vehicles and networks. By covering all of these topics, the book aims to provide a current, comprehensive, and scientifically sound treatment of the emerging field of “autonomous driving".

This book presents the state of the art, challenges and future trends in automotive software engineering. The amount of automotive software has grown from just a few lines of code in the 1970s to millions of lines in today’s cars. And this trend seems destined to continue in the years to come, considering all the innovations in electric/hybrid, autonomous, and connected cars. Yet there are also concerns related to onboard software, such as security, robustness, and trust. This book covers all essential aspects of the field. After a general introduction to the topic, it addresses automotive software development, automotive software reuse, E/E architectures and safety, C-ITS and security, and future trends. The specific topics discussed include requirements engineering for embedded software systems, tools and methods used in the automotive industry, software product lines, architectural frameworks, various related ISO standards, functional safety and safety cases, cooperative intelligent transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, and security and privacy issues. The intended audience includes researchers from academia who want to learn what the fundamental challenges are and how they are being tackled in the industry, and practitioners looking for cutting-edge academic findings. Although the book is not written as lecture notes, it can also be used in advanced master’s-level courses on software and system engineering. The book also includes a number of case studies that can be used for student projects.