Product Description

Robot motion planning has become a major focus of robotics. Research findings can be applied not only to robotics but to planning routes on circuit boards, directing digital actors in computer graphics, robot-assisted surgery and medicine, and in novel areas such as drug design and protein folding. This text reflects the great advances that have taken place in the last ten years, including sensor-based planning, probabalistic planning, localization and mapping, and motion planning for dynamic and nonholonomic systems. Its presentation makes the mathematical underpinnings of robot motion accessible to students of computer science and engineering, relating low-level implementation details to high-level algorithmic concepts.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #218222 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 625 pages

About the Author
Howie Choset is Associate Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Kevin M. Lynch is Associate Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department, Northwestern University.

Seth Hutchinson is Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

George Kantor is Project Scientist in the Center for the Foundations of Robotics, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.

Wolfram Burgard is Professor of Computer Science and Head of the research lab for Autonomous Intelligent Systems at the University of Freiburg.

Lydia E. Kavraki is Professor of Computer Science and Bioengineering, Rice University.

Sebastian Thrun is Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford AI Lab.

Customer Reviews

Not perfect but better than anything else out there

The good news is that this book covers a range of topics in sufficient detail and accuracy
to give students a good understanding of the topic.

Here are some reasons I could not give it 5 stars.

First, the book is uneven. Some details don't seem to really go any place (such as some of the advanced
topics in configuration space). On the other hand, students what to know about SLAM, SLAM and well, more SLAM
(I do not know if I agree with student here... )
Also what about multi-robot systems? Flying robots (are they mobile robots? ). Legged robots?

Also, being an old-school trained robotics person, I thought the discussion kinematics and dynamics was inadequate
and could be beefed up. Perhaps the authors felt that it would take them too far off the main theme? I don't know,
but no D-H parameters? Really?


The text has about 2x as many words as it needs to cover the same material. It could benefit from tighter editing to make
the meaning clearer and the text less wordy. By way of analogy, in the software world K&R probably said everything
there was needed to be said, in a concise way, about C. But, there are many much more wordy books out there..

Oh, and lets see what else.. ahh the algorithms presented. My feeling is that some may obfuscate rather than elucidate.

However, given these defects, this book has a coverage which would be hard to match in several books, and I enjoyed reading it and learning from it...

Comprehensive coverage of the field
At the outset one might expect this book to be pure about motion planning or motion control. In reality the book is remarkably comprehensive in coverage of perception, planning and control with in-depth coverage of basic kinematics, basic planning mechanisms and applied estimation such as Kalman filters for robot perception. The book was written/edited by the first authors with in-depth coverage in particular chapters by the other authors. In the end it is a very coherent, up-to-date and comprehensive book. The book is written to have enough detail for a 1 term senior under-graduate or junior graduate course in robotics or as a reference for practitioners. Truly a great book

Great book on mobile robotics
This is a great book on mobile robotics, a lot of methods are explained in the book and its writing is clear and easy to understand. I have used it on several undergraduate and graduate courses that I have taken, I fully recommend it.