Computational Principles of Mobile Robotics

Mobile robotics is a multidisciplinary field involving both computer science and engineering. Addressing the design of automated systems, it lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence, computational vision, and robotics. This textbook for advanced undergraduates and graduate students emphasizes algorithms for a range of strategies for locomotion, sensing, and reasoning. It concentrates on wheeled and legged mobile robots but discusses a variety of other propulsion systems. The new edition includes advances in robotics and intelligent machines over the last ten years, including significant coverage of SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) and multi-robot systems. It includes additional mathematical background and an extensive list of sample problems. Various mathematical techniques that were assumed in the first edition are now briefly introduced in appendices at the end of the text to make the book more self-contained. Researchers as well as students in the field of mobile robotics will appreciate this comprehensive treatment of state-of-the-art methods and key technologies.

Gregory Dudek is Professor of Computer Science and Director of the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He holds a James McGill Chair and is a member of the Center for Intelligent Machines, and has been co-author of over 150 refereed publications on robotics and computer vision.

Michael Jenkin is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at York University. He has co-edited a series of eight books on human and machine vision.