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Rating: 
Summary: Be careful.
Review: Be careful, if you read this book and actually obtain any knowledge from it, Robin Murphy may try to sue you!
Rating:
Summary: Where's the editor?
Review: good book. Informative for someone getting started in robotics. Explains different basic programming techniques for robot behavior. I had it as a textbook in my robotics class
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent book
Review: I wonder how the first reviewers gave so bad comments on the book. I think it is not the author but the first reviewers who mislead the readers. If I took their comments, I would miss a really excellent book.The contents in this book are rich, entensive, systematic and well-organized. One of my colleagues borrowed it from me several times, and finally he ordered another copy himself! We really appreciate the book and the author.
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Summary: One stop shopping for AI in Mobile Robotics
Review: Robin Murphy's book is a one-stop shopping source for AI and Motion planning in mobile robotics. She provides a breadth of topics and puts them in an organized historical context. I plan on using this book as a supplement for my undergraduate course on robotics, as well as my graduate course on motion planning. This book has also inspired me to write a conference on the relationships between architectures and behavior-based methods. The book also contains examples of many up-to-date robots. Barring popular media-style books, this book contains the most vast collection of robots and relates them to the academic principles outlined in the book. Finally, the text contains many useful examples. I like that Dr. Murphy straddles the hobbyist-collegiate border by allowing for earlier examples to be constructed from LEGO Mindstorms.
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Summary: Where's the editor?
Review: This book is an unedited nightmare. Dr. Choset's glowing review(s) might be taken with a grain of salt, given that he serves as "Director of Research Outreach" beneath the author at CRASAR. While the language is suitable for a novice, it is plagued by errors both grammatical and technical. While the former (at roughly one per page) are merely distracting, the latter often incorrectly change the sense entirely. Code snippets masquerade as "C or C++", but aren't suitable even as pseudo code. Luckily, most are trivial enough that mistakes become obvious, but missing cases and lack of any error handling whatsoever mean that you're not going to be typing examples into an editor. In addition, many assume a machine state but don't show this initialization. This might be excusable had the code been lifted directly from source, but half the time backslashes are used to begin comments! A few examples from a chapter on vision: "Consumer digital cameras post an analog signal, but the update rate is too slow at this time for real-time reactive robot control." "Most commercial devices in the U.S. use a NTSC (television) standard. Color is expressed as the sum of three measurements: red, green, and blue." "red = image_red[row][col];
red = image_green[row][col];
red = image_blue[row][col];
display_color(red, green, blue);" "His Cybermotion robot was one of the first to navigate in hallways using vision; in this case, a technique known as a Hough (pronounced "huff") transform. In the early 1990's, with slow hardware, the robot could go 8 to 9 meters per second." Hint: The robot platform isn't capable of going 1/10 that speed. Such mistakes are so common that one wonders whether she just couldn't be bothered to do the research and resorted to making it up. This book may be okay for a casual read and it does have the endnotes going for it, but don't use it as a textbook unless you enjoy confusing students. If you're serious about behavior-based robotics, get Arkin.
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Summary: Excellent Introductory Text
Review: This book presents a well-thought out and structured introduction to an exciting field. The material is well pitched, well described and always placed in context. Additional information, such as the history of various approaches, timelines, and end of chapter notes, add to the instructional material in the book and provided some insight into the world of the Roboticist. Each concept was described in sufficient detail for someone who, like me, was looking for a reasonably detailed overview of the field before becoming more involved, and provided sufficient detail to motivate a reader to experiment on their own, and accomplish a great deal. Once, however, you decide that you wish to dig further, a more specialised book in a particular sub-field might be advisable. The book also ends with a chapter on the future of the field, which was interesting as well as useful. One annoying thing about the book was that, as a first edition, it contained many spelling and word omission errors. While none of these individually impacted my appreciation of the book, they did interrupt of the flow of some chapters. Overall, though, an excellent and exciting text.
Rating:
Summary: Very good
Review: Well, this may be not especially useful to you, but I also own the book and just wanted to give you a second opinion, which happens to be that Pri$m is completely right. Every single word is true. I don't know what more to write... Maybe just my pre-education: I am fairly familiar with computers and programming, but didn't know too much about robotics prior to reading this book. Nevertheless, it was very interesting and I recommend, too. Buy it if you are interested in the topic!
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