Advances in Telerobotics

The main purpose of this book is to provide readers with recent advances in the field of Telerobotics. It describes methods, experimental results, applications, and developments, highly relevant for scientists, researchers, and students in Teleoperation. In its broadest sense Telerobotics may be defined as the technology that deals with the inclusion of a human operator in the control loop of a remote robot. Many scientific disciplines are to contribute to the area of telerobotics: mechatronics, control, communication, engineering, computer science, speech/gesture/image recognition, psychology (psychophysics), etc. Multimodality – vision, audio, haptics – and teleoperation through the Internet are important contemporary issues. This book is structured in three parts: I. Human System Interfaces, II. Control, and III. Applications. Chapters in part I concentrate on human interface technology which allows a human operator to close the control loop of a remote robot. Topics related to control algorithms - in particular for the case with time delay in the communication network - are the focus in part II, concentrating on bilateral control methods. Part III presents a variety of advanced applications in surgery, space, and other fields relevant to everyday life. The book is complemented by a CD containing fifteen research videos, which make the contents of the book even more descriptive. This collection of videos can also be found at www.lsr.ei.tum.de/telerobotics. The editors would like to thank all the authors for their valuable contributions to this book. The quality and freshness found in each chapter are due to the excellent work carried out by the authors. In addition we would like to offer our special thanks to the junior researchers who have made large parts of their PhD theses available in the chapters of this volume.