Robot Competitions

Robot competitions are a fun way for people who build robots to test their designs. Roboticists face off in exciting challenges and contests to determine whose robot is the smartest, the fastest, or the strongest. From playing soccer to moving through mazes to completing search-and-rescue missions, these robots are designed to do amazing things. Find out more about fascinating robot competitions all around the world and how they're challenging people to build robots that are even more incredible!

One of the most hands-on and exciting hobbies and extracurricular activities for students interested in STEM is participating in robotics competitions. This book, newly updated to reflect the latest advances in amateur and professional robotics, including the exploding popularity of the Maker movement, gives readers all they need to enter this competitive and dynamic field. More importantly, readers learn the basics of how to build prize-winning robots, and how to find and enter contests, including local, regional, and national ones.

Each year thousands of students of all ages enter robot competitions through their schools or other organizations. They can compete alone or as part of a team in competitions like Lunabotics Junior and the RoboCupJunior soccer games. Learn about the history of robot competitions, how students can get creative with their robots, and more.

This book is the fifth official archival publication devoted to RoboCup. It documents the achievements presented at the 5th Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences held in Seattle, Washington, USA, in August 2001.The book contains the following parts: introduction, champion teams, challenge award finalists, technical papers, poster presentations, and team descriptions (arranged according to various leagues).This book is mandatory reading for the rapidly growing RoboCup community as well as a valuable source of references and inspiration for R&D professionals interested in multi-agent systems, distributed artificial intelligence, and intelligent robotics.

The second edition of this handbook provides a state-of-the-art overview on the various aspects in the rapidly developing field of robotics. Reaching for the human frontier, robotics is vigorously engaged in the growing challenges of new emerging domains. Interacting, exploring, and working with humans, the new generation of robots will increasingly touch people and their lives. The credible prospect of practical robots among humans is the result of the scientific endeavour of a half a century of robotic developments that established robotics as a modern scientific discipline. The ongoing vibrant expansion and strong growth of the field during the last decade has fueled this second edition of the Springer Handbook of Robotics. The first edition of the handbook soon became a landmark in robotics publishing and won the American Association of Publishers PROSE Award for Excellence in Physical Sciences & Mathematics as well as the organization’s Award for Engineering & Technology. The second edition of the handbook, edited by two internationally renowned scientists with the support of an outstanding team of seven part editors and more than 200 authors, continues to be an authoritative reference for robotics researchers, newcomers to the field, and scholars from related disciplines. The contents have been restructured to achieve four main objectives: the enlargement of foundational topics for robotics, the enlightenment of design of various types of robotic systems, the extension of the treatment on robots moving in the environment, and the enrichment of advanced robotics applications. Further to an extensive update, fifteen new chapters have been introduced on emerging topics, and a new generation of authors have joined the handbook’s team. A novel addition to the second edition is a comprehensive collection of multimedia references to more than 700 videos, which bring valuable insight into the contents. The videos can be viewed directly augmented into the text with a smartphone or tablet using a unique and specially designed app. Springer Handbook of Robotics Multimedia Extension Portal: http://handbookofrobotics.org/

This book includes the post-conference proceedings of the 20th RoboCup International Symposium, held in Leipzig, Germany, in July 2016. In addition to the 38 contributions to the symposium, selected from 63 submissions, the book also contains 15 champion papers of teams winning individual leagues of the RoboCup 2016 competition, the Amazon Picking Challenge, and the Harting Open Source Award. The papers present current research in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence with a special focus to robot hardware and software, environment perception, action planning and control, robot learning, multi-robot systems, and human-robot interaction.

This book is the Proceedings of the 19th Annual RoboCup International Symposium, held in Hefei, China, in July 2015. The book contains 20 papers presented at the Symposium, carefully selected from 39 submissions. Additionally the book contains 11 champion team papers and one paper from the Workshop on Benchmarking Service Robots. The papers present current research in robotics, artificial intelligence, computer vision, multiagent systems, simulation, and other areas.

The book Human-Robot Interaction - Perspectives and Applications highlights the latest developments and obstacles in the field of human-machine interaction, including collaborative and humanoid robots, symbiosis between humans and robots, human-human collaboration, and robotics. Human-robot interaction has immense potential in areas like healthcare, education, manufacturing, military, and space exploration. This volume consists of several chapters that explore various topics such as the use of robotic wheelchairs, deep neural networks for robot grasp recognition, materials and sensors required for human-robot interaction, the use of drone technology in agriculture, healthcare robots in smart hospitals, and more.