Page 1 - Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots

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Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots
Roland Siegwart and Illah R. Nourbakhsh
Illah R. NOURBAKHSH
Mobile robots range from the teleoperated Sojourner on the Mars Pathfinder
mission to cleaning robots in the Paris Metro. Introduction to Autonomous
Mobile Robots offers students and other interested readers an overview of the
technology of mobility—the mechanisms that allow a mobile robot to move
through a real world environment to perform its tasks—including locomotion,
sensing, localization, and motion planning. It discusses all facets of mobile robotics, Introduction to Roland SIEGWART
including hardware design, wheel design, kinematics analysis, sensors and per-
ception, localization, mapping, and robot control architectures.
The design of any successful robot involves the integration of many different
disciplines, among them kinematics, signal analysis, information theory, artificial
intelligence, and probability theory. Reflecting this, the book presents the tech-
niques and technology that enable mobility in a series of interacting modules.
Each chapter covers a different aspect of mobility, as the book moves from low-
level to high-level details. The first two chapters explore low-level locomotory
ability, examining robots’ wheels and legs and the principles of kinematics. This is
followed by an in-depth view of perception, including descriptions of many “off-
the-shelf” sensors and an analysis of the interpretation of sensed data. The final
two chapters consider the higher-level challenges of localization and cognition, Autonomous Mobile Robots SIEGWART and
discussing successful localization strategies, autonomous mapping, and navigation
competence. Bringing together all aspects of mobile robotics into one volume,
Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots can serve as a textbook for course-
work or a working tool for beginners in the field. Introduction to Autonomous

Roland Siegwart is Professor and Head of the Autonomous Systems Lab at the
Mobile Robots
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne. Illah R. Nourbakhsh is Associate
Professor of Robotics in the Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science, at
Carnegie Mellon University.

“This book is easy to read and well organized. The idea of providing a robot
functional architecture as an outline of the book, and then explaining each
component in a chapter, is excellent. I think the authors have achieved their
goals, and that both the beginner and the advanced student will have a clear
idea of how a robot can be endowed with mobility.”
—Raja Chatila, LAAS-CNRS, France NOURBAKHSH

Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents series
A Bradford Book

0-262-19502-X
The MIT Press
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142
http://mitpress.mit.edu