Planning algorithms are impacting technical disciplines and industries around the world, including robotics, computer-aided design, manufacturing, computer graphics, aerospace applications, drug design, and protein folding. This coherent and comprehensive book unifies material from several sources, including robotics, control theory, artificial intelligence, and algorithms. The treatment is centered on robot motion planning but integrates material on planning in discrete spaces. A major part of the book is devoted to planning under uncertainty, including decision theory, Markov decision processes, and information spaces, which are the “configuration spaces” of all sensor-based planning problems. The last part of the book delves into planning under differential constraints that arise when automating the motions of virtually any mechanical system. Developed from courses taught by the author, the book is intended for students, engineers, and researchers in robotics, artificial intelligence, and control theory as well as computer graphics, algorithms, and computational biology.

Planning Algorithms: Introductory Material

Bilateral teleoperation: An historical survey

http://robots.stanford.edu/papers/thrun.tourguide.pdf

Experiences with an interactive museum tour-guide robot

Applications, systems and methods for permitting simultaneous use of a file by two or more computers over a network may include storing the file locally in a local storage device associated with a local computer; providing access to the file by at least one remote computer which is connectable to the local computer via the network, and wherein at least one of the computers is connectable to the network through a firewall element. The file may be stored in at least one remote storage device associated with the at least one remote computer, respectively, and versions of the file contained on the one or more remote storage devices are synchronized with that on the local device by transmitting over the network connecting the one or more remote storage devices with the local device, at least one of Delta files and Inverse Delta files between the remote storage devices and the local storage device. A method of remotely observing computer activity on a second computer remote with respect to a first computer is also provided. Further, file sharing systems and methods are provided for sharing files among computers.

Managed peer-to-peer applications, systems and methods for distributed data access and storage

In this paper, an attempt at summarizing the evolution and the state of the art in the field of robot hands is made. In such exposition, a critical evaluation of what in the author's view are the leading ideas and emerging trends is privileged with respect to exhaustiveness of citations. The survey is focused mainly on three types of functional requirements a machine hand can be assigned in an artificial system, namely, manipulative dexterity, grasp robustness, and human operability. A basic distinction is made between hands designed for mimicking the human anatomy and physiology,and hands designed to meet restricted, practical requirements. In the latter domain, arguments are presented in favor of a -minimalistic" attitude in the design of hands for practical applications, i.e., use the least number of actuators, the simplest set of sensors, etc., for a given task. To achieve this rather obvious engineering goal is a challenge to our community. The paper illustrates some of the new sometimes difficult, problems that are brought about by building and controlling simpler, more practical devices.

/pdf/hands-for-dexterous-manipulation-and-robust-grasping-a-507g47znm9.pdf

Hands for dexterous manipulation and robust grasping: a difficult road toward simplicity

We built a system that allows a robot manipulator to be teleoperated via the WWW. Although the field of teleoperation dates back over 50 years, the WWW provides a low-cost and widely-available interface that can make teleoperated resources accessible to anyone with a desktop or laptop computer and modem. The "Mercury Project" consists of an industrial robot arm fitted with a CCD camera and a pneumatic system. We placed a sandbox filled with buried artifacts in the robot workspace. Using the ISMAP feature of HTTP, users can remotely move the camera to view desired locations or direct a short burst of compressed air into the sand to view the newly cleared region. To our knowledge, the Mercury Project is the first system to permit WWW users to remotely view and alter the real world. This paper focuses on interface design, robot hardware, and system architecture.

/pdf/desktop-teleoperation-via-the-world-wide-web-3iopjbav1q.pdf

Desktop teleoperation via the World Wide Web

Initiated at CERN in 1992, the World Wide Web provides a standard graphical interface to the Internet, and the number of users worldwide has grown exponentially in the last few years. In the Spring of 1994, we conjectured that it might be possible to offer public access to a teleoperated robot via the WWW. As a feasibility study in 1994, we built a system that allows a robot manipulator to be teleoperated via the Internet. Although the field of teleoperation dates back over 50 years, HTTP provides a low-cost and widely available interface that can make teleoperated resources accessible to a broad range of users. The Mercury Project consisted of an industrial robot arm fitted with a CCD camera and a pneumatic system. We placed a sandbox filled with buried artifacts in the robot workspace. Novice users remotely moved the camera to view desired locations and directed short bursts of compressed air into the sand to view the newly cleared regions. To our knowledge, the Mercury Project was the first Internet robot. It was available almost continuously from August 1994 through March 1995 and was accessed by over 50,000 unique hosts. The article focuses on the interface design, robot hardware, and architecture of the system.

/pdf/the-mercury-project-a-feasibility-study-for-internet-robots-2l9tpzewim.pdf

The Mercury Project: a feasibility study for Internet robots

This paper describes a WWW site that allows users to “leave the Web” and interact with the real world. An interdisciplinary team of anthropologists, computer scientists and electrical engineers collaborated on the project, desigining a system which consists of a robot arm fitted with a CCD camera and a pneumatic system. By clicking on an ISMAP control panel image, the operator of the robot directs the camera to move vertically or horizontally in order to obtain a desired position and image. The robot is located over a dry-earth surface allowing users to direct short bursts of compressed air onto the surface using the pneumatic system. Thus robot operators can “excavate” regions within the environment by positioning the arm, delivering a burst of air, and viewing the image of the newly cleared region. This paper describes the system in detail, addressing critical issues such as robot interface, security measures, user authentication, and interface design. We see this project as a feasibility study for a broad range of WWW applications.

https://goldberg.berkeley.edu/pubs/Beyond-the-Web-journal-1995.pdf

Beyond the Web: manipulating the real world

Reviews Peshkin and Sanderson (1988) who showed that parts can be aligned as they move on a conveyor belt against a passive sequence of fences. Describes the first complete algorithm to design such sequences for a given convex polygonal part. The algorithm is complete in the sense that it is guaranteed to find a design if one exists and to terminate with a negative report otherwise. Based on an exact breadth‐first search of the design space, the algorithm is also guaranteed to find the design requiring the fewest fences. Describes the algorithm and compares results with those previously reported. Conjectures that a fence design exists to orient any convex polygonal part defined by a sequence of rational vertices.

A complete algorithm for designing passive fences to orient parts

To be cost effective and highly precise, many industrial assembly robots have only four degrees of freedom (DOF) plus a binary pneumatic gripper. Such robots commonly permit parts to be rotated only about a vertical axis. However it is often necessary to reorient parts about other axes prior to assembly. In this paper the authors describe a way to orient parts about an arbitrary axis by introducing a rotating bearing between the jaws of a simple gripper. Based on this mechanism, the authors are developing a rapidly configurable vision-based system for feeding parts. In this system, a camera determines initial part pose; the robot then reorients the part to achieve a desired final pose. The authors have implemented a prototype version in their laboratory using a commercially-available robot system. >

/pdf/a-pivoting-gripper-for-feeding-industrial-parts-1d4w2w207f.pdf

J. Wiegley

Papers

Desktop teleoperation via the World Wide Web

The Mercury Project: a feasibility study for Internet robots

Beyond the Web: manipulating the real world

A complete algorithm for designing passive fences to orient parts

A pivoting gripper for feeding industrial parts