Complex Robotic Systems

The challenges that mankind must face in this era of astonishing progress in technology calls for the development of a common and up-to-date worldwide knowledge base. When working at this book our intention was to realize a small contribution to the achievment of this goal within the field of Robotics.

Robotic systems have proven themselves to be of increasing importance and are widely adopted to substitute for humans in repetitive and/or hazardous tasks. Their diffusion has outgrown the limits of industrial applications in manufacturing systems to cover all the aspects of exploration and servicing in hostile environments such as undersea, outer space, battlefields, and nuclear plants.

Complex robotic systems, i.e. robotic systems with a complex structure and architecture, are gaining increasing attention from both the academic community and industrial users.The modeling and control problems for these systems cannot be regarded as simple extensions of those for traditional single manipulators since additional complexity arises: to accomplish typical tasks there is the need to ensure coordinated motion of the whole system together with management of interaction between each component of the system.

This book focuses on two examples of complex robotic systems; namely cooperating manipulators and multi-fingered hands.