Remote Manipulation Systems: Quality Evaluation and Improvement: 17 (Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering, 17) - Tapa dura

Reseña del editor

A famous French writer, Anatole France, liked to say, "The future is a convenient place to position our dreams" (1927). Indeed, this remark gains full meaning when one considers the history of what we call today "Robotics." For more than 3000 years, mankind has dreamt ofthe possibility of arti­ ficial machines that would have all the advantages of human slaves without any of their drawbacks. With the developments in technology since the end of World War II, mainly with the explosive progress of computers, it was thought we might at last succeed in transforming this everlasting dream into reality. In the mind of scientists of the 1950's, to make such intelligent and autonomous machines before the year 2000 seemed a small challenge: it was obvious, thanks to computers and Artificial Intelligence. But, in spite of progress in some directions, we must admit that the dream remains a dream and that the basic problems denying us a successful issue are not solved. In fact, if we except industrial robots, only calling for classical automata theory, the main advanced result concerning autonomous and intelligent machines is related to some understanding of reasons why we have failed during the past years.

Reseña del editor

This book focuses on the issues of remote control of manipulators in a free workspace.
Relatively new data on remote control for telerobots are presented. The primary emphasis is:

• a systematic presentation of the materials using a comparatively few, not well-publicized, examples as illustrations;
• a systematic presentation of materials on the quantitative evaluation of quality of remote manipulation systems with practical implementation using test stands;
• a presentation of the author's own descriptions of remote control systems; essentially, the adaptive coordinate-parameter control method for telerobots.