Written to complement and build on Nehmzow's earlier book: Scientific Methods in Mobile Robotics this new book is practical in its approach and includes examples of modelling and analysing observed behaviour based on real-world robotics scenarios. Robots have been changing our lives for some decades now, and will become even more important in the future. The scientific and industrial community have used them extensively in the past to investigate theoretical concepts of cognition, machine intelligence, theories of behavioural mechanisms in living beings, to manipulate and transport objects, or for inspection and exploration tasks. Increasingly, however, robots are also becoming relevant components of political life: industrialised nations are investing large amounts of money into research of care for the elderly, using robots, or for healthcare applications. Entertainment robots occupy a small niche at the moment, but this will increase, and so too will the use of robots in military applications.
"Robot Behaviour - Design, Description, Analysis and Modelling" is the successor to the first textbook published in this field: Scientific Methods in Mobile Robotics and introduces the emerging field of scientific methods in mobile robotics to a wider audience of advanced undergraduate students, postgraduate students as well as researchers in robotics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, ethology, biology and psychology.
Raising some of the big questions that roboticists should be concerned about - how can (robot) behaviour be described quantitatively?, how can experimental results be compared meaningfully?, is it possible to design faithful and accurate robot simulators@, etc - , this book gives indicators on how these might be addressed, and looks at how behaviour - in this case the behaviour of autonomous mobile robots can be measured quantitatively, analysed, compared, and modelled. Statistical methods are introduced to compare behaviours and to state statistically significant differences in behaviour. Transparent modelling techniques derived from system identification are presented to obtain models of robot behaviour in closed mathematical form.
With numerous exercises (and solutions) and examples from research, including how robot behaviours can be compared and evaluated, how robot platform-independent code (Robot Java) can be obtained, how to determine analytically which sensors of a robot are important and which are not, and how to obtain robot control code directly from observing a human demonstrator,without any traditional programming, this book will be of great value to researchers and graduate students in mobile robotics, behavioural science and cognitive science.
