International Encyclopedia of Robotics Applications and Automation ...

Automatica, Vol. 26, No. 5, pp. 937-940, 1990 Printed in Great Britain. Pergamon Press plc International Federation of Automatic Control

Book Reviews

International Encyclopedia of Robotics Applications and Automation, Volumes 1-3.* Richard C. Doff (Editor)

developing trends is given, which is very advantageous in the opinion of the reviewer. Naturally this encyclopedia deals not only with robotics but also with related topics. In addition to the classical topics in robotics like kinematics, dynamics, control, sensors, programming and programming languages, grippers, arms and wrists, some articles deal with the fundamentals of robotics e.g. automation, cybernetics and communication. As a matter of fact a lot of contributions describe "conventional" applications of robots e.g. welding, painting, assembling, machine loading and unloading. But unconventional applications like police robots, robots in food processing, robots in the garment and shoe industry and even home robots are included in this encyclopedia. These contributions are arranged in two ways: first referring to the kind of application and second according to the field of application, which is very helpful for the reader. In fact the field of factory automation--CIM (Computer Integrated Manufacturing)--is overrepresented. Robots in CIM systems will be of increasing interest in the near future but contributions on OSI (Open Systems Architecture), MAP (Multiple Allocation Procedure/Macro Assembly Program) and LAN (Local Area Network) are not absolutely necessary in an encyclopedia on robotics. O n the other hand, not predominantly scientific reports on robots in literature, movies, shows and communications, and home robots are a nice supplement. The field of control is very well represented. There are contributions dealing with robot control systems and especially with controller architecture, control strategies, numerical control, motion control, adaptive control methods, control of flexible robots, state-feedback robot control, control of multiple-robot systems and voice control. These contributions, especially, are quite different. Some of them are very theoretical for an encyclopedia and require a lot of theoretical background; some are verbal descriptions, and last but not least some are a very good mixture of both. The publication is completed by contributions from the fields of economics, social sciences and education. This encyclopedia is absolutely necessary for an overview of this very important part of automation. It should be included in all libraries of persons involved in the field of robotics.

Reviewer: P. KOPACEK Johannes Kepler Universit~it, enschaften, 4040 Linz, Austria.

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THE WHOLE field of robotics has been growing up dramatically during the last years. One of the main problems in robotics is the interd/2sciplinarity. Technical as well as nontechnical fields are necessary for understanding robotics. Examples are mechanical engineering (construction of the arms and the gears), electrical engineering (drives like ac-, dc- and stepping motors), computer sciences (hard- and software of the control computer), control engineering (position control of the axes including supervisory control), mechanics (kinematics and kinetics), mathematics (optimal path planning, collision detection), social sciences (human factors) and economics (efficiency). The literature on robotics is distributed through a lot of books, articles in journals and papers from conferences and symposia. These publications are mainly written by experts coming from one of these fields related to robotics and therefore have distinct emphases. Only a few are written by teams of experts from various fields. This was the reason for the first idea in 1984 of collecting contributions by authors from companies, research institutes and universities, working in different fields of robotics, for an encyclopedia of three volumes. This encyclopedia was finished in 1988. The result is an excellent overview of the whole field of robotics, in the broadest sense. In 2000 pages the field of robotics is divided into approximately 300 contributions of different length. It must have been difficult to select appropriate topics as well as authors for these contributions. The contributions are arranged in alphabetical order by headline. They reflect the special ideas of the authors, start with an introduction, end with an outline on future developing trends, and are completed by a short list of major references. The first volume of the encyclopedia starts with a very helpful collection of abbreviations, unit symbols and conversion factors. From "accuracy of robots" to "wrists" all main terms and related terms are explained more or less in detail. Maybe the editor tried to standardize the length of the contributions but they differ and unfortunately the length is not proportional to the relevance now. Naturally each contribution reflects the opinion of the author and some of these contributions are well-known copies of papers from the literature. It might be a disadvantage that most of the authors are from the United States and some are unknown in Europe. For some chapters, authors from the international robotic "world" could give more relevant contributions than these. At the end of each contribution an outline on future

About the reviewer Peter Kopacek was born in Vienna in 1939. He received his diploma degree in mechanical engineering in 1966 and his doctor degree in control engineering in 1971, both from the Technical University of Vienna. He has been a lecturer at various universities and a consultant of different companies. Since 1986 he has been a full Professor of Systems Engineering and Automation at the University of Linz. Besides this he is the current chairman of the working group on "Education in Robotics and Manufacturing Automation" in the EDCOM of IFAC.

*International Encyclopedia of Robotics--Applications and Automation, Vols 1-3, by Richard C. Doff (Ed.). Wiley, Chichester (1988). ISBN 0-471-87868-5. 937