Illah Reza Nourbakhsh

Robot futures

A roboticist imagines life with robots that sell us products, drive our cars, even allow us to assume new physical form, and more. With robots, we are inventing a new species that is part material and part digital. The ambition of modern robotics goes beyond copying humans, beyond the effort to make walking, talking androids that are indistinguishable from people. Future robots will have superhuman abilities in both the physical and digital realms. They will be embedded in our physical spaces, with the ability to go where we cannot, and will have minds of their own, thanks to artificial intelligence. In Robot Futures, the roboticist Illah Reza Nourbakhsh considers how we will share our world with these creatures, and how our society could change as it incorporates a race of stronger, smarter beings. Nourbakhsh imagines a future that includes adbots offering interactive custom messaging; robotic flying toys that operate by means of “gaze tracking”; robot-enabled multimodal, multicontinental telepresence; and even a way that nanorobots could allow us to assume different physical forms. Nourbakhsh examines the underlying technology and the social consequences of each scenario. He also offers a counter-vision: a robotics designed to create civic and community empowerment. His book helps us understand why that is the robot future we should try to bring about.

Robot Futures

Interleaving Planning and Execution for Autonomous Robots develops a formal representation for interleaving planning and execution in the context of incomplete information. This work bridges the gap between theory and practice in robotics by presenting control architectures that are provably sound, complete and optimal, and then describing real-world implementations of these robot architectures. Dervish, winner of the 1994 AAAI National Robot Contest, is one of the robots featured. Interleaving Planning and Execution for Autonomous Robots is based on the author's PhD research, covering the same material taught in CS 224, the very popular Introduction to Robot Programming Laboratory taught at Stanford for four years by Professor Michael Genesereth and the author.

Interleaving Planning and Execution for Autonomous Robots

Jennifer Keating

An examination of the implications for society of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence systems, combining a humanities perspective with technical analysis; includes exercises and discussion questions. AI and Humanity provides an analytical framing and a common language for understanding the effects of technological advances in artificial intelligence on society. Coauthored by a computer scientist and a scholar of literature and cultural studies, it is unique in combining a humanities perspective with technical analysis, using the tools of literary explication to examine the societal impact of AI systems. It explores the historical development of these technologies, moving from the apparently benign Roomba to the considerably more sinister semi-autonomous weapon system Harpy. The book is driven by an exploration of the cultural and etymological roots of a series of keywords relevant to both AI and society. Works examined range from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, given a close reading for its themes of literacy and agency, to Simon Head's critique of the effects of surveillance and automation on the Amazon labor force in Mindless. Originally developed as a textbook for an interdisciplinary humanities-science course at Carnegie Mellon, AI & Humanity offers discussion questions, exercises (including journal writing and concept mapping), and reading lists. A companion website provides updated resources and a portal to a video archive of interviews with AI scientists, sociologists, literary theorists, and others.

AI and Humanity

Roland Siegwart

Davide Scaramuzza

The second edition of a comprehensive introduction to all aspects of mobile robotics, from algorithms to mechanisms. Mobile robots range from the Mars Pathfinder mission's teleoperated Sojourner to the cleaning robots in the Paris Metro. This text offers students and other interested readers an introduction to the fundamentals of mobile robotics, spanning the mechanical, motor, sensory, perceptual, and cognitive layers the field comprises. The text focuses on mobility itself, offering an overview of the mechanisms that allow a mobile robot to move through a real world environment to perform its tasks, including locomotion, sensing, localization, and motion planning. It synthesizes material from such fields as kinematics, control theory, signal analysis, computer vision, information theory, artificial intelligence, and probability theory. The book presents the techniques and technology that enable mobility in a series of interacting modules. Each chapter treats a different aspect of mobility, as the book moves from low-level to high-level details. It covers all aspects of mobile robotics, including software and hardware design considerations, related technologies, and algorithmic techniques. This second edition has been revised and updated throughout, with 130 pages of new material on such topics as locomotion, perception, localization, and planning and navigation. Problem sets have been added at the end of each chapter. Bringing together all aspects of mobile robotics into one volume, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots can serve as a textbook or a working tool for beginning practitioners. Curriculum developed by Dr. Robert King, Colorado School of Mines, and Dr. James Conrad, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, to accompany the National Instruments LabVIEW Robotics Starter Kit, are available. Included are 13 (6 by Dr. King and 7 by Dr. Conrad) laboratory exercises for using the LabVIEW Robotics Starter Kit to teach mobile robotics concepts.

Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots, second edition

L’uomo sta creando una «specie» completamente nuova di robot, in parte materiale e in parte digitale. La robotica moderna non si occupa più di androidi identici agli esseri umani, come avviene nei film: la tecnologia è lanciata a creare macchine indiscutibilmente superiori agli uomini e in grado di fare cose che noi non potremo mai fare. Illah Nourbakhsh – uno dei leader mondiali della ricerca robotica – ci racconta in questo libro dei «bot» del futuro prossimo e di quelli che verranno appena un po’ più in là: robot multimodali che ci consentiranno di essere in più luoghi nello stesso momento e persino nanorobot in grado di assumere forme fisiche diverse. Nessuno ci può guidare su questo terreno meglio di Nourbakhsh che, ignorando le etichette, apre ogni capitolo con una storia vera – la descrizione di un momento qualunque di una giornata piena di robot, che potrebbe essere normale tra qualche anno –, per poi tornare a vestire i panni dello scienziato e raccontarci in che modo giungeremo tecnicamente in questo futuro. Sarà senza dubbio una rivoluzione dalle conseguenze difficilmente prevedibili.

Illah Reza Nourbakhsh

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