This book derives techniques which allow reliable plans to be automatically selected by intelligent machines. It concentrates on the uncertainty analysis of candidate plans so that a highly reliable candidate may be identified and used. For robotic components, such as a particular vision algorithm for pose estimation or a joint controller, methods are explained for directly calculating the reliability. However, these methods become excessively complex when several components are used together to complete a plan. Consequently, entropy minimization techniques are used to estimate which complex...

One critical barrier leading to successful implementation of flexible manufacturing and related automated systems is the ever-increasing complexity of their modeling, analysis, simulation, and control. Research and development over the last three decades has provided new theory and graphical tools based on Petri nets and related concepts for the design of such systems. The purpose of this book is to introduce a set of Petri-net-based tools and methods to address a variety of problems associated with the design and implementation of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs), with several...

The fusion of information from sensors with different physical characteristics, such as sight, touch, sound, etc., enhances the understanding of our surroundings and provides the basis for planning, decision-making, and control of autonomous and intelligent machines.

The minimal representation approach to multisensor fusion is based on the use of an information measure as a universal yardstick for fusion. Using models of sensor uncertainty, the representation size guides the integration of widely varying types of data and maximizes the information contributed to a consistent...

Computational Intelligence (CI) is a recently emerging area in fundamental and applied research, exploiting a number of advanced information processing technologies that mainly embody neural networks, fuzzy logic and evolutionary computation. With a major concern to exploiting the tolerance for imperfection, uncertainty, and partial truth to achieve tractability, robustness and low solution cost, it becomes evident that composing methods of CI should be working concurrently rather than separately. It is this conviction that research on the synergism of CI paradigms has experienced significant...