Computational Principles of Mobile Robotics

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Summary: Comprehensive robotics text
Review: The book is an excellent comprehensive survey of the mobile robotics, especially for a reader interested developing new mobile robot hardware and software. The authors discuss most of the major research issues in mobile robotics in depth, including locomotion and control, sensing and state estimation, and planning algorithms. Additionally, many of the most successful techniques are covered in enough depth to act as a how-to for implementors. For example, a popular state estimation technique is the Kalman filter, which can be readily implemented directly from the description of the algorithm in the text.

This book distinguishes itself in that it focuses on the algorithms, and general lessons learned in designing robots, both hardware and software. Many robotics books get involved in the details of hardware and become obsolete at a rapid pace. This book should be very useful for the university classroom for quite some time.

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Summary: Great book in Robotics
Review: This book covers the field of mobile robotics, providing both historical references and cutting edge information. Although I have been in the field of mobile robotics for five years I discovered many overlooked facts through this book.

Moreover, I found this book very well written and easy to read. I believe it would make a great introductory text for anybody interested in the technology of the future. This book could be extremely useful as a text for a university course in robotics.

Rating:
Summary: Too general
Review: This book is too general. It's like a 'review' of techniques used, methods in robotics etc. Furthermore, you need other books to be able to help you to understand what it's talking about.

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Summary: Excellent mobile robotics textbook
Review: This book provides a solid and fairly comprehensive coverage of mobile robotics including both basic mobile platforms, sensor systems, computational vision, method for reasoning and planning, mapping, and a few practical examples. The approach adopted is based on a solid theoretical foundation. Thus the reader needs at least first year calculus and statistics to really appreciate this book.

The coverage is comprehensive in the sense that it provides a good introduction to all the topics needed in order to develop a ombile robot system. In addition to this the text has a fairly comprehensive bibliography with adequate pointers to relevant literature. The book has a slight bias towards computational vision, which is not surprising given the history of the authors, but overall the coverage is well balanced.

This book is close to perfect for a one year university course on the introduction to "mobile robotics". Anyone entering mobile robotics to do research in this field ought to read this book.

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Summary: A good and practical book
Review: This books is divided into three main parts: locomotion, sensing, and reasoning. That is lots to cover in a smallish book. I think the writers did a good job paring downing the information. There is enough information in all the sections to give a hobbyist robot builder like myself something to work with. At the same time, the book doesn't get bogged down with implimentation details. Some of you might not like that, especially if you are looking for a how-to book. This book will give, for example, some ideas for wheel arrangements for a robot, and some math that could prove useful for programming and design. The book does NOT give details about how to program, or how to attach wheels, etc.

This book might be scary for the math-phobic, but those of you who skip over the math in books should still find this book useful. Readers with a year of Calculus and some Linear Algebra will have no problems.

There are lots of robot designs discussed with some helpful (thought poorly reproduced) photographs. There is a brief historical background to the robotics field, and some thoughts about what future developments are needed to really make mobile robots useful and flexible devices.

And finally, there is a very large bibliography, and a good index.

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Summary: Beginner Robotics Reference Book
Review: This is a great robotics book for beginners, spanning through all relevant subjects (navigation, steering, sensors, environment, planning, etc.) with sufficient depth to satisfy and, hopefully, appeal to anyone new to this field.