Francis X. Govers - Artificial Intelligence for Robotics

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First published: August 2018

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ISBN 978-1-78883-544-2

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Francis X. Govers is an autonomous vehicle designer at Bell Helicopter Textron. He is the designer of 28 unmanned vehicles or robots for land, sea, air, and space, including RAMSEE, the autonomous security guard robot. Francis helped design the International Space Station, the F-35 JSF Fighter, the US Army Future Combat Systems, and systems for NASCAR and IndyCar. He is an engineer, pilot, author, musician, artist, and maker. He received five outstanding achievement awards from NASA and recognition from Scientific American for World Changing Ideas.

I want to thank everyone who supported me in the writing of this book, starting with my wife, Carol, who cheered me on; our adult children, Jessica, Peter, Corbin, and Ammie, for their encouragement. To my grandchildren, William, Oliver, Amelia, and Henry, for their inspiration. To my editors at Packt Publishing, Namrata Patil and Sharon Raj, for encouragement and tireless dedication. I also have to thank Dr. Bob Finkelstein, my robotics guru and mentor. Finally, to Jay Blanchard, my oldest and dearest friend and fellow author.

Nikhil Borkar holds a CQF designation and a post-graduate degree in quantitative finance. He also holds the Certified Financial Crime examiner and Certified Anti-Money Laundering Professional qualifications. He is a registered research analyst with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and has a keen grasp of the Indian regulatory landscape pertaining to securities and investments. He is currently working as an independent FinTech and legal consultant. Prior to this, the worked with Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) as a global RFP project manager.

Lentin Joseph is an author and robotics entrepreneur from India. He runs a robotics software company called Qbotics Labs in India. He has 8 years of experience in the robotics domain, primarily in ROS, OpenCV, and PCL. He has authored seven books on ROS, which include Learning Robotics Using Python, both the first and second edition, Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming, first and second edition. He has a master's in Robotics and Automation and also did research at Robotics Institute, CMU, USA.

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The objective of this book is to deliver exactly what is on the cover Artificial Intelligence for Robotics. The emphasis is on machine learning techniques applied to ground mobile robots. The book starts with professional robot design principles that have been scaled down for smaller robot projects. The AI section begins with convolutional neural networks for object recognition and continues with reinforcement learning and genetic algorithms. The robot gets a voice and learns to tell jokes using AI-based voice recognition that can discern user intent. The book introduces a novel way to navigate without a map using a literal divide and conquer program that uses the upper part of the room to remember paths, and the lower part of avoid obstacles. The book demonstrates how path planning, decision trees, object classification, and navigation are all part of the same problem set. We finish by giving the robot an artificial personality. The final chapter concludes with thoughts on the future of robots and gives advice on robotics as a career.

The entire book is built around a single fun example task, which is to design and build a robot that can pick up toys in an indoor, unstructured environment. As you will learn, this project is anything but easy.