Testbeds are gaining increasing relevance in research domains and also in industrial applications. However, very few books devoted to testbeds have been published. To the best of my knowledge no book on this topic has been published. This book is particularly interesting for the growing community of testbed developers. I believe the book is also very interesting for researchers in robot-WSN cooperation. This book provides detailed description of a system that can be considered the first testbed that allows full peer-to-peer interoperability between heterogeneous robots and ubiquitous systems such as Wireless Sensor Networks, camera networks and pervasive computing systems. The system architecture includes modules that allows full bidirectional communication between robots and WSN. One robot can The book describes the current state of the art in development of testbeds integrating Cooperating Object technologies. It describes in detail the testbed specification and design using requirements extracted from surveys among experts in robotics and ubiquitous systems in academia and industry. The book also describes the testbed novel architecture and its hardware and software components. Moreover, it includes details on user support tools to facilitate its use such as remote use using a virtual private network and sets of functionalities of interest for members from the robotics, WSN and robot-WSN communities. Finally, the book illustrates its capabilities and potentialities describing the implementation of some of the experiments that have been performed. Examples from the robotics, WSN and robot-WSN communities are described.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Futuristic Trends in Network and Communication Technologies, FTNCT 2018, held in Solan, India, in February 2018. The 37 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 239 submissions. The prime aim of the conference is to invite researchers from different domains of network and communication technologies to a single platform to showcase their research ideas. The selected papers are organized in topical sections on communication technologies, Internet of Things (IoT), network technologies, and wireless networks.

A revolutionary new framework that draws on insights from ecology for the design and analysis of long-duration robots Robots are increasingly leaving the confines of laboratories, warehouses, and manufacturing facilities, venturing into agriculture and other settings where they must operate in uncertain conditions over long timescales. This multidisciplinary book draws on the principles of ecology to show how robots can take full advantage of the environments they inhabit, including as sources of energy. Magnus Egerstedt introduces a revolutionary new design paradigm—robot ecology—that makes it possible to achieve long-duration autonomy while avoiding catastrophic failures. Central to ecology is the idea that the richness of an organism’s behavior is a function of the environmental constraints imposed by its habitat. Moving beyond traditional strategies that focus on optimal policies for making robots achieve targeted tasks, Egerstedt explores how to use survivability constraints to produce both effective and provably safe robot behaviors. He blends discussions of ecological principles with the development of control barrier functions as a formal approach to constraint-based control design, and provides an in-depth look at the design of the SlothBot, a slow and energy-efficient robot used for environmental monitoring and conservation. Visionary in scope, Robot Ecology presents a comprehensive and unified methodology for designing robots that can function over long durations in diverse natural environments.

Localization and tracking are key functionalities in ubiquitous computing systems and techniques. In recent years a very high variety of approaches, sensors and techniques for indoor and GPS-denied environments have been developed. This book briefly summarizes the current state of the art in localization and tracking in ubiquitous computing systems focusing on cluster-based schemes. Additionally, existing techniques for measurement integration, node inclusion/exclusion and cluster head selection are also described in this book.

There are a number of different system concepts that have gained much relevance in the area of embedded systems over the past couple of years. First, there is the classic concept of embedded systems where the focus is on control systems for physical processes. Secondly, the notion of pervasive computing has evolved, where the vision foresees everyday objects having some form of computation capacity and, in most cases, sensing and communication facilities. Thirdly, the notion of wireless sensor networks has arisen, where small computing devices are able to sense their environment and cooperate in order to achieve a well-defined goal. These three types of quite diverse systems share a lot of commonalities on the one hand and, on the other hand, have some complementary aspects in common that make a combination of these systems into a coherent system vision promising. In particular, the important notions of control, heterogeneity, wireless communication, dynamic and ad-hoc nature and cost are prevalent to various degrees in each of these systems. A future system concept needs to combine the strong points of all three system concepts in at least these functional aspects. It has to provide support for the control of physical processes like today’s embedded systems do, have as good support for device heterogeneity and spontaneity of usage as required by pervasive and ubiquitous computing approaches, and has to be as cost efficient and wirelessly agile as wireless sensor networks are. These new systems consist, therefore, of individual entities or objects that jointly strive to reach a common goal, which will typically be a goal in sensing or control, and are dynamically and loosely federating themselves for cooperation, taking care not to overtax their available resources. This book presents a roadmap to these concepts which are summarized as cooperating objects.

This book contains the proceedings of the ROBOT 2013: FIRST IBERIAN ROBOTICS CONFERENCE and it can be said that included both state of the art and more practical presentations dealing with implementation problems, support technologies and future applications. A growing interest in Assistive Robotics, Agricultural Robotics, Field Robotics, Grasping and Dexterous Manipulation, Humanoid Robots, Intelligent Systems and Robotics, Marine Robotics, has been demonstrated by the very relevant number of contributions. Moreover, ROBOT2013 incorporates a special session on Legal and Ethical Aspects in Robotics that is becoming a topic of key relevance. This Conference was held in Madrid (28-29 November 2013), organized by the Sociedad Española para la Investigación y Desarrollo en Robótica (SEIDROB) and by the Centre for Automation and Robotics - CAR (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) and Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)), along with the co-operation of Grupo Temático de Robótica CEA-GTRob, "Sociedade Portuguesa de Robotica" (SPR), "Asociación Española de Promoción de la Investigación en Agentes Físicos" (RedAF), and partially supported by "Comunidad de Madrid under RoboCity2030 Programme".

Web-Based Learning: Theory, Research, and Practice explores the state of the art in the research and use of technology in education and training from a learning perspective. This edited book is divided into three major sections: *Policy, Practice, and Implementation Issues -- an overview of policy issues, as well as tools and designs to facilitate implementation of Web-based learning; *Theory and Research Issues -- a look at theoretical foundations of current and future Web-based learning; the section also includes empirical studies of Web-based learning; and *Summary and Conclusions -- highlights key issues in each chapter and outlines a research and development agenda. Within this framework the book addresses several important issues, including: the primacy of learning as a focus for technology; the need to integrate technology with high standards and content expectations; the paucity of and need to support the development of technology-based curriculum and tools; the need to integrate assessment in technology and improve assessment through the use of technology; and the need for theory-driven research and evaluation studies to increase our knowledge and efficacy. Web-Based Learning is designed for professionals and graduate students in the educational technology, human performance, assessment and evaluation, vocational/technical, and educational psychology communities.

This book will examine the issues of IoT according to three complementary axes: technique, use, ethics. The techniques used to produce artefacts (physical objects, infrastructures), programs (algorithms, software) and data (Big data, linked data, metadata, ontologies) are the subject of many innovations as the field of IoT is rich and stimulating. Along with this technological boom, IoT uses colonize new fields of application in the fields of transport, administration, housing, maintenance, health, sports, well-being. ... Privileged interface with digital ecosystems now at the heart of social exchanges, the IoT develops a power to act whose consequences both good and bad make it difficult to assess a fair business.