Page 12 - Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of inspirations and contributions from many researchers and students
at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Carnegie Mellon Univer-
sity’s Robotics Institute, Pittsburgh (CMU), and many others around the globe.
We would like to thank all the researchers in mobile robotics that make this field so rich
and stimulating by sharing their goals and visions with the community. It is their work that
enables us to collect the material for this book.
The most valuable and direct support and contribution for this book came from our past
and current collaborators at EPFL and CMU. We would like to thank: Kai Arras for his con-
tribution to uncertainty representation, feature extraction and Kalman filter localization;
Matt Mason for his input on kinematics; Nicola Tomatis and Remy Blank for their support
and assistance for the section on vision-based sensing; Al Rizzi for his guidance on feed-
back control; Roland Philippsen and Jan Persson for their contribution to obstacle avoid-
ance; Gilles Caprari and Yves Piguet for their input and suggestions on motion control;
Agostino Martinelli for his careful checking of some of the equations and Marco Lauria for
offering his talent for some of the figures. Thanks also to Marti Louw for her efforts on the
cover design.
This book was also inspired by other courses, especially by the lecture notes on mobile
robotics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETHZ). Sincere thank goes
to Gerhard Schweitzer, Martin Adams and Sjur Vestli. At the Robotics Institute special
thanks go to Emily Hamner and Jean Harpley for collecting and organizing photo publica-
tion permissions. The material for this book has been used for lectures at EFPL and CMU
since 1997. Thanks go to all the many hundreds of students that followed the lecture and
contributed thought their corrections and comments.
It has been a pleasure to work with MIT Press, publisher of this book. Thanks to Ronald
C. Arkin and the editorial board of the Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents series
for their careful and valuable review and to Robert Prior, Katherine Almeida, Sharon
Deacon Warne, and Valerie Geary from MIT Press for their help in editing and finalizing
the book.
Special thanks also to Marie-Jo Pellaud at EPFL for carefully correcting the text files
and to our colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and Carnegie
Mellon University.