Advanced Mobile Robotics: Volume 3

Mobile robotics is a challenging field with great potential. It covers disciplines including electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science, cognitive science, and social science. It is essential to the design of automated robots, in combination with artificial intelligence, vision, and sensor technologies. Mobile robots are widely used for surveillance, guidance, transportation and entertainment tasks, as well as medical applications. This Special Issue intends to concentrate on recent developments concerning mobile robots and the research surrounding them to enhance studies on the fundamental problems observed in the robots. Various multidisciplinary approaches and integrative contributions including navigation, learning and adaptation, networked system, biologically inspired robots and cognitive methods are welcome contributions to this Special Issue, both from a research and an application perspective

Aerial Vehicles

This book contains 35 chapters written by experts in developing techniques for making aerial vehicles more intelligent, more reliable, more flexible in use, and safer in operation.It will also serve as an inspiration for further improvement of the design and application of aeral vehicles. The advanced techniques and research described here may also be applicable to other high-tech areas such as robotics, avionics, vetronics, and space

Wireless mosaic eyes based robot path planning and control. Autonomous robot navigation using environment intelligence with distributed vision sensors.

As an attempt to steer away from developing an autonomous robot with complex centralised intelligence, this thesis proposes an intelligent environment infrastructure where intelligences are distributed in the environment through collaborative vision sensors mounted in a physical architecture, forming a wireless sensor network, to enable the navigation of unintelligent robots within that physical architecture. The aim is to avoid the bottleneck of centralised robot intelligence that hinders the application and exploitation of autonomous robot. A bio-mimetic snake algorithm is proposed to coordinate the distributed vision sensors for the generation of a collision free Reference-snake (R-snake) path during the path planning process. By following the R-snake path, a novel Accompanied snake (A-snake) method that complies with the robot's nonholonomic constraints for trajectory generation and motion control is introduced to generate real time robot motion commands to navigate the robot from its current position to the target position. A rolling window optimisation mechanism subject to control input saturation constraints is carried out for time-optimal control along the A-snake. A comprehensive simulation software and a practical distributed intelligent environment with vision sensors mounted on a building ceiling are developed. All the algorithms proposed in this thesis are first verified by the simulation and then implemented in the practical intelligent environment. A model car with less on-board intelligence is successfully controlled by the distributed vision sensors and demonstrated superior mobility