DNA Press
Revisualizing robotics; new DNA for surviving a world of cheap labor.
Is your robot reading this for you? If not, you must have just realized the age of robots promised us has not been delivered. Skaar (aerospace and mechanical engineering, U. of Notre Dame) and computational electrodynamics researcher del Castillo find out what happened, noting the industry has hit a technological dead end. After describing the current "teach-and-repeat" approach and its simple, reliable but limited capacity, they describe a host of new ideas such as following nature, using camera space kinematics, supervising through point-and-click, developing holonomic robot kinematics, extending teach-and-repeat to nonholonomic robots, using mobile camera-space manipulation to realize maneuver objectives in the reference frames of moving cameras, and, you guessed it, using the Internet. Appendices include a description of forward kinematics for a holonomic robot. Distributed by the Independent Publishers Group. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
