Industrial Robots Programming focuses on designing and building robotic manufacturing cells, and explores the capabilities of today’s industrial equipment as well as the latest computer and software technologies. Special attention is given to the input devices and systems that create efficient human-machine interfaces, and how they help non-technical personnel perform necessary programming, control, and supervision tasks.

Drawing upon years of practical experience and using numerous examples and illustrative applications, J. Norberto Pires covers robotics programming as it applies to:

• The current industrial robotic equipment including manipulators, control systems, and programming environments.
  
• Software interfaces that can be used to develop distributed industrial manufacturing cells and techniques which can be used to build interfaces between robots and computers.
  
• Real-world applications with examples designed and implemented recently in the lab.

This book is supported by a website http://robotics.dem.uc.pt/indrobprog that includes software code for the examples presented, various software applications developed by the author and videos of all examples presented and discussed.

"…an excellent handbook on automation for manufacturing or industrial engineering." -- Ergonomics in Design

"…provides the essential concepts and methods required for solving technical and managerial problems…. "…a well presented and comprehensive reference text." -- Assembly Automation

. . .provides the essential concepts and methods required for solving technical and managerial problems. . .. . . .a well presented and comprehensive reference text.
---Assembly Automation

. . .an excellent handbook on automation for manufacturing or industrial engineering.
---Ergonomics in Design

. . .recommended for academic libraries or libraries with significant holdings in industrial engineering.
---E-Streams

A comprehensive reference for the industrial automation engineer, covering technical, economic, and certain legal standards. Also useful for students in the field as it provides a single source for a large amount of information about industrial automation, including the mathematics involved such as probability theory and calculus.

This monograph presents a novel concept of a mobile robot, which is a single-wheel, gyroscopically stabilized robot. The robot is balanced by a spinning wheel attached through a two-link manipulator at the wheel bearing, and actuated by a drive motor. This configuration conveys significant advantages including insensitivity to attitude disturbances, high maneuverability, low rolling resistance, ability to recover from falls, and amphibious capability for potential applications on both land and water. This book focuses on the dynamics and control aspects, including modeling, model-based control, learning-based control, and shared control with human operators. This novel mobile robot concept opens up the science of dynamically stable systems with a single wheel configuration. The book also presents considerations in concept, design implementations, and kinematics modeling, as well as experimental results from various algorithms and cases. The system is a nonholonomic, underactuated, and highly nonlinear system, so this book is appropriate for scientists and engineers with interests in mobile robot, dynamics and control, as a research reference and postgraduate textbook.

From the reviews of the first edition:

"The monograph is concerned with the position and force control of redundant robot manipulators from both theoretical and experimental points of view. It contains a rich bibliography as well as a full symbol and subject index. Its aim is to provide an introduction for graduate students and researchers in the field of control of redundant robot manipulators. … it is a useful learning tool for scientists and engineers from academia and industry." (Clementina Mladenova, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1081, 2006)

This monograph provides a comprehensive and thorough treatment of the problem of controlling a redundant robot manipulator. It presents the latest research from the field with a good balance between theory and practice. All theoretical developments are verified both via simulation and experimental work on an actual prototype redundant robot manipulator. This book is the first text aimed at graduate students and researchers working in the area of redundant manipulators giving a comprehensive coverage of control of redundant robot manipulators from the viewpoint of theory and experimentation.

Robotic systems have proved themselves to be of increasing importance and are widely adopted to substitute for humans in repetitive or hazardous situations. Their diffusion has outgrown the limits of industrial applications in manufacturing systems to co ver all aspects of exploration and servicing in hostile environments such as undersea, outer space, battlefields and nuclear plants. Complex robotic systems - ie robotic systems with a complex structure and architecture - are gaining increasing attention from both the academic community and industrial users. The modelling and control problems for these systems cannot be regarded as simple extensions of those for traditional single manipulators, since additional complexity arises; to accomplish tasks there is the need to ensure co-ordinated motion of the whole system together with management of interaction between each component of the system. This book focuses on two examples of complex robotic systems - namely co-operating manipulators and multi-fingered hands. It is addressed to graduate students as well as to researchers in the field.

From the reviews:

"This interesting monograph is devoted to the study of multi-agent, populations of biological cells and robot teams. … The main objective of the approach is to provide solutions to the problem of how dynamics of an individual agent propagates to the population dynamics. … This original monograph has a wide interest for scholars in the area of multi-agent systems, including computational biology, biometrical engineering, nano-robotics, and even aerospace engineering." (Silvia Curteanu, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1147, 2008)

Cells and Robots is an outcome of the multidisciplinary research extending over Biology, Robotics and Hybrid Systems Theory. It is inspired by modeling reactive behavior of the immune system cell population, where each cell is considered as an independent agent. In our modeling approach, there is no difference if the cells are naturally or artificially created agents, such as robots. This appears even more evident when we introduce a case study concerning a large-size robotic population scenario. Under this scenario, we also formulate the optimal control of maximizing the probability of robotic presence in a given region and discuss the application of the Minimum Principle for partial differential equations to this problem. Simultaneous consideration of cell and robotic populations is of mutual benefit for Biology and Robotics, as well as for the general understanding of multi-agent system dynamics.

The text of this monograph is based on the PhD thesis of the first author. The work was a runner-up for the fifth edition of the Georges Giralt Award for the best European PhD thesis in Robotics, annually awarded by the European Robotics Research Network (EURON).

About the Author

Dejan Milutinovic received his Dipl. Ing. (1995) and M.Sc. (1999) in Electrical Engineering at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, Yugoslavia, and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering (2004) at Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon Technical University, Portugal.

In 1995 he was employed at "Mihajlo Pupin" Institute, Belgrade, working on real-time control industrial applications. In 2000 he moved to the Institute of Systems and Robotics, Lisbon, where he worked on his PhD thesis. From 2004 to 2006 he was a post-doc at Theoretical Biology Department of Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Presently, he is a post-doc at Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Department of Duke University Medical Center, NC, USA.

His scientific interest is in the area of modeling and control of stochastic dynamical systems applied to the immune system and Robotics. In 2005, he was recognized as a runner-up for the best PhD thesis of European Robotics by the European Robotics Research Network (EURON) jury in the 5th edition of Georges Giralt PhD Award.

Pedro Lima got his Ph.D. (1994) in Electrical Engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon Technical University. He is also a member of the Institute for Systems and Robotics, a Portuguese private research institution, where he is co-coordinator of the Intelligent Systems group and a member of the Scientific Council.

Pedro Lima is a Trustee of the RoboCup Federation, and was the General Chair of RoboCup2004, held in Lisbon. He is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems and of the Portuguese magazine Robótica, a founding member of the Portuguese Robotics Society, the elected chair of the IEEE RAS Portugal Chapter, and a senior member of the IEEE. He is also the co-editor of two special issues of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, one special issue of Elsevier’s Journal of Robotics Autonomous Systems, the author of a book and several journal and conference papers.

His scientific interests are in the areas of hybrid systems, discrete event systems and reinforcement learning, mainly in their applications to complex large-scale systems, such as multi-robot systems. He has also been very active in the promotion of Science and Technology to the society, through the organization of Robotics events in Portugal, including the Portuguese Robotics Open since 2001.

Building Cocoa Applications is an ideal book for serious developers who want to write programs for the Mac OS X using Cocoa. It's a no-nonsense, hands-on text that's filled with examples -- not only simple and self-contained examples of individual Cocoa features, but extended examples of complete applications with enough sophistication and complexity that readers can put them to immediate use in their own environments. Building Cocoa Applications takes a step-by-step approach to teaching developers how to build real graphics applications using Cocoa. By showing the basics of an application in one chapter and then layering additional functionality onto that application in subsequent chapters, the book keeps readers interested and motivated. Readers will see immediate results, and then go on to build onto what they've already achieved. By the end of the book, readers who have built the applications as they have read will have a solid understanding of what it really means to develop complete and incrementally more complex Cocoa applications. The book comes with extensive source code available for download from the O'Reilly web site, along with an appendix listing additional resources for further study.

About the Author

Simson Garfinkel, CISSP, is a journalist, entrepreneur, and international authority on computer security. Garfinkel is chief technology officer at Sandstorm Enterprises, a Boston-based firm that develops state-of-the-art computer security tools. Garfinkel is also a columnist for Technology Review Magazine and has written for more than 50 publications, including Computerworld, Forbes, and The New York Times. He is also the author of Database Nation; Web Security, Privacy, and Commerce; PGP: Pretty Good Privacy; and seven other books. Garfinkel earned a master's degree in journalism at Columbia University in 1988 and holds three undergraduate degrees from MIT. He is currently working on his doctorate at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science.

Michael K. Mahoney is Dean of the College of Engineering at California State University, Long Beach, where he is also a Professor of Computer Engineering and Computer Science. Formerly, he was the Associate Vice President for Academic Information Technology and Chair of the Department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science. Dr. Mahoney started programming at NeXT Computer, Inc. in January 1989 and coauthored (with Simson Garfinkel) NeXTSTEP Programming, Step One: Object-Oriented Applications (Springer-Verlag). He has given presentations on object-oriented programming and NeXTSTEP's Interface Builder at ACM meetings in Seattle, Los Angeles, Monterey, and New Orleans. Before becoming dean, he regularly taught university courses in computer graphics, user interface design, object-oriented programming, discrete mathematics, and web development. He has supervised eight Master's theses. Mahoney earned his Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1979. He has published papers in computer graphics, computer science education, and mathematics. He has won campuswide teaching awards at both UCSB and CSULB. His web site is http://www.csulb.edu/~mahoney/.

This is the first book to explain the newest internet threat - Botnets, zombie armies, bot herders, what is being done, and what you can do to protect your enterprise!

The book begins with real world cases of botnet attacks to underscore the need for action. Next the book will explain botnet fundamentals using real world examples. These chapters will cover what they are, how they operate, and the environment and technology that makes them possible. The following chapters will analyze botnets for opportunities to detect, track, and remove them. Then the book will describe intelligence gathering efforts and results obtained to date. Public domain tools like OurMon, developed by Jim Binkley of Portland State University, will be described in detail along with discussions of other tools and resources that are useful in the fight against Botnets.

* This is the first book to explain the newest internet threat - Botnets, zombie armies, bot herders, what is being done, and what you can do to protect your enterprise
* Botnets are the most complicated and difficult threat the hacker world has unleashed - read how to protect yourself

About the Author

Craig A Schiller (CISSP-ISSMP, ISSAP) is the CISO for Portland State University and President of Hawkeye Security Training, LLC. He is the primary author of the first Generally Accepted System Security Principles. He is a co-author of "Combating Spyware in the Enterprise" and "Winternals" from Syngress, several editions of the Handbook of Information Security Management, and a contributing author to Data Security Management. Mr. Schiller has co-founded two ISSA chapters, the Central Plains chapter and the Texas Gulf Coast Chapter.

Jim Binkley is a teacher, network engineer, and researcher in the Computer Science Department at Portland State University. Jim has twenty five years of experience with UNIX operating system internals and twenty years of experience with TCP/IP networking. Jim teaches a graduate sequence of networking classes including TCP/IP, routing, and network security, and also teaches operating system classes including Linux O.S. internals, Linux Device Drivers, and BSD TCP/IP stack internals.

This book constitutes the presentations made at the Advanced Research Workshop on Autonomous Robotic Systems, which was held at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, June 1997. The aim of the meeting was to bring together leading researchers in the area of autonomous systems for mobility and manipulation, and the aim of this book is to share the presentations with the reader. The book presents the most recent developments in the field. Topics include sensors and navigation in mobile robots, robot co-operation, telerobotics, legged robots, climbing robots and applications. Existing and emerging applications of autonomous syst ems are described in great detail, including applications in forestry, cleaning, mining, tertiary buildings, assistance to the elderly and handicapped, and surgery. The chapters are written in a structured and advanced tutorial style by leading specialists from Europe, Australia, Japan and USA. The style will allow the reader to grasp the state-of-the-art and research directions in the area of autonomous systems.

It has long been the goal of engineers to develop tools that enhance our ability to do work, increase our quality of life, or perform tasks that are either beyond our ability, too hazardous, or too tedious to be left to human efforts. Autonomous mobile robots are the culmination of decades of research and development, and their potential is seemingly unlimited. Roadmap to the Future Serving as the first comprehensive reference on this interdisciplinary technology, Autonomous Mobile Robots: Sensing, Control, Decision Making, and Applications authoritatively addresses the theoretical, technical, and practical aspects of the field. The book examines in detail the key components that form an autonomous mobile robot, from sensors and sensor fusion to modeling and control, map building and path planning, and decision making and autonomy, and to the final integration of these components for diversified applications. Trusted Guidance A duo of accomplished experts leads a team of renowned international researchers and professionals who provide detailed technical reviews and the latest solutions to a variety of important problems. They share hard-won insight into the practical implementation and integration issues involved in developing autonomous and open robotic systems, along with in-depth examples, current and future applications, and extensive illustrations. For anyone involved in researching, designing, or deploying autonomous robotic systems, Autonomous Mobile Robots is the perfect resource.

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are evolving into highly integrated technologies for a variety of application areas. Add the biological dimension to the mix and a host of new problems and issues arise that require a broad understanding of aspects from basic, materials, and medical sciences in addition to engineering. Collecting the efforts of renowned leaders in each of these fields, BioMEMS: Technologies and Applications presents the first wide-reaching survey of the design and application of MEMS technologies for use in biological and medical areas. This book considers both the unique characteristics of biological samples and the challenges of microscale engineering. Divided into three main sections, it first examines fabrication technologies using non-silicon processes, which use materials that are appropriate for medical/biological analyses. These include UV lithography, LIGA, nanoimprinting, injection molding, and hot-embossing. Attention then shifts to microfluidic components and sensing technologies for sample preparation, delivery, and analysis. The final section outlines various applications and systems at the leading edge of BioMEMS technology in a variety of areas such as genomics, drug delivery, and proteomics. Laying a cross-disciplinary foundation for further development, BioMEMS: Technologies and Applications provides engineers with an understanding of the biological challenges and biological scientists with an understanding of the engineering challenges of this burgeoning technology.