Preface
This is an introductory book on the subject of wheeled mobile robotics, covering all the essential knowledge and algorithms that are required in order to achieve autonomous capabilities of mobile robots. The book can serve both as a textbook for engineering students and a reference book for professionals in the field. As a textbook, it is suitable for courses in mobile robotics, especially if the courses’ main emphasis is on mobile robots with wheels. The book covers topics from mathematical modeling of motion, sensors and measurements, control algorithms, path planning, nondeterministic events, and state estimation. The theory is supported with examples that have solutions and excerpts of Matlab code listings in order to make it simple for the reader to try, evaluate, and modify the algorithms. Furthermore, at the end of the book some interesting practical projects are depicted, which can be used for laboratory practice or to consolidate the theory learned.
The field of autonomous mobile robotics is an extremely popular field of research and development. Within this field the majority of mobile robots use wheels for motion. Wheeled mobile robots leave tracks where no man has ever been (e.g., extraterrestrial explorations), man should not go (e.g., dangerous or contaminated areas), or act alongside humans (e.g., human support and assistance). Wheeled mobile robots have already started to penetrate into our homes in the form of robotic floor cleaners and lawn mowers, automatic guided vehicles can be found inside many industrial facilities, prototype self-driving cars already drive in the normal traffic, and in the nearby future many new applications of autonomous wheeled mobile robots are expected to appear, even in some unforeseen ways. The purpose of this book is to shed some light onto the design and give a deeper insight into the algorithms that are required in order to implement autonomous capabilities of wheeled mobile robots. The book addresses essential problems in wheeled mobile robotics and presents to the reader various approaches that can be used to tackle them. The presented algorithms range from basic and simple solutions to more advanced and state-of-the-art approaches.
The complete Matlab code listings of the algorithms that are presented in this book are also available for download at the book companion website: http://booksite.elsevier.com/9780128042045/. Therefore it should be simple for the readers to try, evaluate, tweak and tune the algorithms by themselves. The website also contains many animated videos from the examples that give an additional insight into the topics and algorithms covered in the book.
August 2016