1st Edition
Mechatronics and Robotics New Trends and Challenges
The term “mechatronics” was coined in 1969, merging “mecha” from mechanism and “tronics” from electronics, to reflect the original idea at the basis of this discipline, that is, the integration of electrical and mechanical systems into a single device. The spread of this term, and of mechatronics itself, has been growing in the years, including new aspects and disciplines, like control engineering, computer engineering and communication/information engineering.
Nowadays mechatronics has a well-defined and fundamental role, in strict relation with robotics. Drawing a sharp border between mechatronics and robotics is impossible, as they share many technologies and objectives. Advanced robots could be defined as mechatronic devices equipped with a “smart brain”, but there are also up-to-date mechatronic devices, used in tight interaction with humans, that are governed by smart architectures (for example, for safety purposes).
Aim of this book is to offer a wide overview of new research trends and challenges for both mechatronics and robotics, through the contribution of researchers from different institutions, providing their view on specific subjects they consider as “hot topics” in both fields, with attention to new fields of application, new challenges to the research communities and new technologies available.
The reader of this book will enjoy the various contributions, as they have been prepared with actual applications in mind, along a journey from advanced actuators and sensors to human-robot interaction, through robot control, navigation, planning and programming issues. The book presents several state-of-the-art solutions, like multiple-stage actuation to cope with conflicting specification of large motion-spans, ultra-high accuracy, model-based control for high-tech mechatronic systems, modern approaches of software systems engineering to robotics, aand humanoids for human assistance. The reader can also find new techniques in approaching the design of mechatronic systems in some possible industrial and service robotics scenarios, with a particular attention for the interaction between humans and mechanisms.
Chapter 1 Mechatronics versus Robotics
Marina Indri and Roberto Oboe
Chapter 2 Advanced Actuators for Mechatronics
Makoto Iwasaki
Chapter 3 Advanced Sensors for Mechatronics
Naoki Oda, Toshiaki Tsuji, Yasue Mitsukura, Takahiro Ishikawa, Yuta Tawaki, Toshiyuki Murakami, Satoshi Suzuki, and Yasutaka Fujimoto
Chapter 4 Model-Based Control for High-Tech Mechatronic Systems
Tom Oomen and Maarten Steinbuch
Chapter 5 Control and Manipulation
Bruno Siciliano and Luigi Villani
Chapter 6 Navigation, Environment Description, and Map Building
Henry Carrillo, Yasir Latif, and José A. Castellanos
Chapter 7 Path Planning and Collision Avoidance
Hubert Gattringer, Andreas M¨uller, and Klemens Springer
Chapter 8 Robot Programming
Christian Schlegel, Dennis Stampfer, Alex Lotz, and Matthias Lutz
Chapter 9 Network Robotics
Lorenzo Sabattini, Cristian Secchi, and Claudio Melchiorri
Chapter 10 Intelligent, Adaptive Humanoids for Human Assistance
Darwin G Caldwell, Arash Ajoudani, Jinoh Lee, and Nikos Tsagarakis
Chapter 11 Advanced Sensors and Vision Systems
Van-Dung Hoang and Kang-Hyun Jo
Chapter 12 Human–Robot Interaction
Kouhei Ohnishi
Biography
Marina Indri is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications of Politecnico di Torino, Italy, teaching Robotics and Automatic Control. She serves as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, and as a Technical Editor of the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics.
Roberto Oboe is an Associate Professor in Automatic Control at the University of Padova, Italy. He is currently VP for Technical Activities, Chair of the Management Committee of the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics and Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.