Robotic systems are complicated, nonlinear, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, which make the design of model-based controllers for robotic systems particularly difficult. Moreover, to achieve reasonable control performance, the dynamic coupling effects between degrees of freedom (DOFs) of the robotic systems must be overcome during the control process. Although a model-free, self-o...

Robotics and medical engineering can convert traditional surgery into digital and scientific procedures. Here, we describe our work to develop microsurgical robotic systems and apply engineering technology to assess microsurgical skills. With the collaboration of neurosurgeons and an engineering team, we have developed two types of microsurgical robotic systems. The first, the deep surgical sys...

The foundation of surgical robotics is in the development of the robotic arm. This is a thorough review of the literature on the nature and development of this device with emphasis on surgical applications. We have reviewed the published literature and classified robotic arms by their application: show, industrial application, medical application, etc. There is a definite trend in the manufactu...

We propose economically autonomous behavior as a novel goal for robotic systems. Currently examples of robotic autonomy are often limited to restricted physical environments such as a factory or road. In this paper we instead restrict the notion of autonomy to a social environment: the economy. We define economically autonomous behavior and describe different levels of independence culminating ...

The paper presents a synthesis of the problematic and actual solutions to the implementation of robotic programmer control functionality using DSP controllers. Considerable technology shift occurred during the recently decade in device programming industry. The advent of high performance DSP motion controllers opens new possibilities for the development of high performance distributed intellige...

Cloud robotics is a field of robotics that attempts to invoke Cloud technologies such as Cloud computing, Cloud storage, and other Internet technologies centered around the benefits of converged infrastructure and shared services for robotics. In a few short years, Cloud robotics as a newly emerged field has already received much research and industrial attention. The use of the Cloud for robot...

Developing robotic systems endowed with self-conscious capabilities means realizing complex sub-systems needing ad-hoc software engineering techniques for their modelling, analysis and implementation. In this chapter the whole process (from analysis to implementation) to model the development of self-conscious robotic systems is presented and the new created design process, PASSIC, supporting e...

Robotic systems and their software design are based on the same principles found in other computer applications. However, while many computer systems to date are deeply rooted in concepts such as multi-processing, multi-threads, modularity, etc., robotic systems are still limited by mono-processing, centralized designs. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a new philosophy for ro...

This Special Issue entitled “Recent Advances on Control and Architectural Design of Robotic Systems” is devoted to current research activities on the above topic that was presented during the Twelve National Conference on Robotics held in Świeradów Zdrój, Poland, September 12-16, 2012. Members of The Programme Committee selected 8 papers based on their merits and quality of presentation during ...