At Uie dawn of ihe new millennium, robotics is undergoing a major transformation in scope and dimension. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics is rapidly expanding into the challenges of unstructured environments. Interacting with, assisting, serving, and exploring with humans, the emerging robots will increasingly touch people and their lives.
The goal of the Springer Tracts in Adwnced Roboiics iSTARi series is to bring, in a timely fashion, the latest advances and developments in robotics on the basis of their significance and quality. It is our hope that the wider dissemination of research developments will stimulate more exchanges and collaborations among the research community and contribute to further advancement of this rapidly growing field.
The monograph written by Geoffrey Taylor and Lindsay Kleeman is an evxilution of the first Author's Ph.D. dissertation. This book provides an integrated systems view of computer vision and robotics, covering a range of fundamental topics including robust and optimal sensor design, visual servoing. 3D object modelling and recognition, and multi-cue tracking. The treatment is in-depth, with details of theory, real-time implementation, and extensive experimental results. As such, the book has wide appeal to both theoretical and practical roboticists. Furthermore, the culmination of the work with the demonstration of two real-world domestic tasks represents a first step towards the realization of autonomous robots for service applications.