Computational Principles of Mobile Robotics 2nd Edition

I'm two chapters in and absolutely love this book: the writing is academic, the scope is wide, and they don't shy away from exploring complex concepts in depth. One of my educational quirks is being afraid of new formulas and equations, but the authors go from 0 to 60 in a logical, iterative progression that is extremely easy to follow. Exposure to calculus would probably be a prerequisite to ready beyond the first chapter.The writing is often dense, I find myself rereading paragraphs, but this is in no way a bad thing. If considering this book, I suggest looking through chapter 2 to evaluate your comfort level.

Good Product that arrived on time.

The book is an excellent comprehensive survey of the mobile robotics, especially for a reader interested developing new mobile robot hardware and software. The authors discuss most of the major research issues in mobile robotics in depth, including locomotion and control, sensing and state estimation, and planning algorithms. Additionally, many of the most successful techniques are covered in enough depth to act as a how-to for implementors. For example, a popular state estimation technique is the Kalman filter, which can be readily implemented directly from the description of the algorithm in the text.This book distinguishes itself in that it focuses on the algorithms, and general lessons learned in designing robots, both hardware and software. Many robotics books get involved in the details of hardware and become obsolete at a rapid pace. This book should be very useful for the university classroom for quite some time.

This book provides a solid and fairly comprehensive coverage of mobile robotics including both basic mobile platforms, sensor systems, computational vision, method for reasoning and planning, mapping, and a few practical examples. The approach adopted is based on a solid theoretical foundation. Thus the reader needs at least first year calculus and statistics to really appreciate this book.The coverage is comprehensive in the sense that it provides a good introduction to all the topics needed in order to develop a ombile robot system. In addition to this the text has a fairly comprehensive bibliography with adequate pointers to relevant literature. The book has a slight bias towards computational vision, which is not surprising given the history of the authors, but overall the coverage is well balanced.This book is close to perfect for a one year university course on the introduction to "mobile robotics". Anyone entering mobile robotics to do research in this field ought to read this book.

This book covers the field of mobile robotics, providing both historical references and cutting edge information. Although I have been in the field of mobile robotics for five years I discovered many overlooked facts through this book.Moreover, I found this book very well written and easy to read. I believe it would make a great introductory text for anybody interested in the technology of the future. This book could be extremely useful as a text for a university course in robotics.

This is a great robotics book for beginners, spanning through all relevant subjects (navigation, steering, sensors, environment, planning, etc.) with sufficient depth to satisfy and, hopefully, appeal to anyone new to this field.

This is one of only two books that I know of that are dedicated to computational issues in robotics, the other one being "Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots". Both of these books are good and excel in certain areas. I think that this book's best chapters are the two on sensors and their algorithms. Both chapters have plenty of details and even some worked numerical examples. The first two chapters on locomotion and robot hardware are pretty good and do have some equations for deriving robot kinematics, but I think that the previously mentioned "Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots" does a slightly better job at presenting that material. Chapters 5 and 6 on "Representing and Reasoning About Space" and the "Operating Environment" are about AI and its uses in the mobile robot. They are an OK introduction, but to really understand this material it would be better to get a copy of "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach", and read the relevant chapters in that book. The next two chapters on "Pose Maintenance" and "Maps and Related Tasks" are very good chapters. They go into some specifics on AI and robot design that I couldn't find in other books, and have quite a bit on the mathematics and algorithms involved. They go into particular detail on the Kalman Filter, but you will still need a more detailed source of information on that subject. I suggest "Poor Man's Explanation of Kalman Filtering: Or How I Stopped Worrying & Learned to Love Matrix Inversion", which is very inexpensive. If you can't find it on Amazon, you can try buying it directly from the publisher, Taygeta Scientific. The last two chapters are just essay-style material on the current and future uses of mobile robots.To get the most out of this book you should already be familiar with statics, dynamics, image processing, computer vision, and the basics of AI. No book on robotics can take you from ground zero, teach you all of these subjects AND computational robotics too. The good books on robotics, of which this is one, show how all of the related disciplines are integrated into the design of a robot.