Yasmina Bestaoui Sebbane – författare

Multi-robot systems are a major research topic in robotics. Designing, testing, and deploying aerial robots in the real world is a possibility due to recent technological advances. This book explores different aspects of cooperation in multiagent systems. It covers the team approach as well as deterministic decision-making. It also presents distributed receding horizon control, as well as conflict resolution, artificial potentials, and symbolic planning. The book also covers association with limited communications, as well as genetic algorithms and game theory reasoning. Multiagent decision-making and algorithms for optimal planning are also covered along with case studies.

Key features:

Both scientists and practitioners in the field of robotics will find this text valuable.

Multi-robot systems are a major research topic in robotics. Designing, testing, and deploying aerial robots in the real world is a possibility due to recent technological advances. This book explores different aspects of cooperation in multiagent systems. It covers the team approach as well as deterministic decision-making. It also presents distributed receding horizon control, as well as conflict resolution, artificial potentials, and symbolic planning. The book also covers association with limited communications, as well as genetic algorithms and game theory reasoning. Multiagent decision-making and algorithms for optimal planning are also covered along with case studies.

Key features:

Both scientists and practitioners in the field of robotics will find this text valuable.

A First Course in Aerial Robots and Drones provides an accessible and student friendly introduction to aerial robots and drones. Drones figure prominently as opportunities for students to learn various aspects of aerospace engineering and design. Drones offer an enticing entry point for STEM studies. As the use of drones in STEM studies grows, there is an emerging generation of drone pilots who are not just good at flying, but experts in specific niches, such as mapping or thermography.

Key Features:

Suitable for undergraduate students, this textbook provides students and other readers with methods for solving problems and improving their science skills.

A First Course in Aerial Robots and Drones provides an accessible and student friendly introduction to aerial robots and drones. Drones figure prominently as opportunities for students to learn various aspects of aerospace engineering and design. Drones offer an enticing entry point for STEM studies. As the use of drones in STEM studies grows, there is an emerging generation of drone pilots who are not just good at flying, but experts in specific niches, such as mapping or thermography.

Key Features:

Suitable for undergraduate students, this textbook provides students and other readers with methods for solving problems and improving their science skills.

Intelligent Autonomy of UAVs: Advanced Missions and Future Use provides an approach to the formulation of the fundamental task typical to any mission and provides guidelines of how this task can be solved by different generic robotic problems. As such, this book aims to provide a systems engineering approach to UAV projects, discovering the real problems that need to be resolved independently of the application.

After an introduction to the rapidly evolving field of aerial robotics, the book presents topics such as autonomy, mission analysis, human-UAV teams, homogeneous and heterogeneous UAV teams, and finally, UAV-UGV teams. It then covers generic robotic problems such as orienteering and coverage. The book next introduces deployment, patrolling, and foraging, while the last part of the book tackles an important application: aerial search, tracking, and surveillance.

This book is meant for both scientists and practitioners. For practitioners, it presents existing solutions that are categorized according to various missions: surveillance and reconnaissance, 3D mapping, urban monitoring, precision agriculture, forestry, disaster assessment and monitoring, security, industrial plant inspection, etc.

For scientists, it provides an overview of generic robotic problems such as coverage and orienteering; deployment, patrolling and foraging; search, tracking, and surveillance. The design and analysis of algorithms raise a unique combination of questions from many fields, including robotics, operational research, control theory, and computer science.

Intelligent Autonomy of UAVs: Advanced Missions and Future Use provides an approach to the formulation of the fundamental task typical to any mission and provides guidelines of how this task can be solved by different generic robotic problems. As such, this book aims to provide a systems engineering approach to UAV projects, discovering the real problems that need to be resolved independently of the application.

After an introduction to the rapidly evolving field of aerial robotics, the book presents topics such as autonomy, mission analysis, human-UAV teams, homogeneous and heterogeneous UAV teams, and finally, UAV-UGV teams. It then covers generic robotic problems such as orienteering and coverage. The book next introduces deployment, patrolling, and foraging, while the last part of the book tackles an important application: aerial search, tracking, and surveillance.

This book is meant for both scientists and practitioners. For practitioners, it presents existing solutions that are categorized according to various missions: surveillance and reconnaissance, 3D mapping, urban monitoring, precision agriculture, forestry, disaster assessment and monitoring, security, industrial plant inspection, etc.

For scientists, it provides an overview of generic robotic problems such as coverage and orienteering; deployment, patrolling and foraging; search, tracking, and surveillance. The design and analysis of algorithms raise a unique combination of questions from many fields, including robotics, operational research, control theory, and computer science.

This book provides an introduction to the emerging field of planning and decision making for aerial robots. An aerial robot is the ultimate form of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, an aircraft endowed with built-in intelligence, requiring no direct human control and able to perform a specific task. It must be able to fly within a partially structured environment, to react and adapt to changing environmental conditions and to accommodate for the uncertainty that exists in the physical world. An aerial robot can be termed as a physical agent that exists and flies in the real 3D world, can sense its environment and act on it to achieve specific goals. So throughout this book, an aerial robot will also be termed as an agent.

Fundamental problems in aerial robotics include the tasks of spatial motion, spatial sensing and spatial reasoning. Reasoning in complex environments represents a difficult problem. The issues specific to spatial reasoning are planning and decision making. Planning deals with the trajectory algorithmic development based on the available information, while decision making determines priorities and evaluates potential environmental uncertainties.

The issues specific to planning and decision making for aerial robots in their environment are examined in this book and categorized as follows: motion planning, deterministic decision making, decision making under uncertainty and finally multi-robot planning. A variety of techniques are presented in this book, and a number of relevant case studies are examined. The topics considered in this book are multidisciplinary in nature and lie at the intersection of Robotics, Control Theory, Operational Research and Artificial Intelligence.

An aerial robot is a system capable of sustained flight with no direct human control and able to perform a specific task. A lighter than air robot is an aerial robot that relies on the static lift to balance its own weight. It can also be defined as a lighter than air unmanned aerial vehicle or an unmanned airship with sufficient autonomy. Lighter than air systems are particularly appealing since the energy to keep them airborne is small. They are increasingly considered for various tasks such as monitoring, surveillance, advertising, freight carrier, transportation.

This book familiarizes readers with a hierarchical decoupled planning and control strategy that has been proven efficient through research. It is made up of a hierarchy of modules with well defined functions operating at a variety of rates, linked together from top to bottom. The outer loop, closed periodically, consists of a discrete search that produces a set of waypoints leading to the goal while avoiding obstacles and weighed regions. The second level smoothes this set so that the generated paths are feasible given the vehicle''s velocity and accelerations limits. The third level generates flyable, timed trajectories and the last one is the tracking controller that attempts to minimize the error between the robot measured trajectory and the reference trajectory. 

This hierarchy is reflected in the structure and content of the book. Topics treated are: Modelling, Flight Planning, Trajectory Design and Control.  Finally, some actual projects are described in the appendix. This volume will prove useful for researchers and practitioners working in Robotics and Automation, Aerospace Technology, Control and Artificial Intelligence.