At the dawn of the new millennium, robotics is undergoing a major transformation in scope and dimension. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics is rapidly expanding into the challenges of unstructured environments. Interacting with, assi- ing, serving, and exploring with humans, the emerging robots will increasingly touch people and their lives. The goal of the new series of Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR) is to bring, in a timely fashion, the latest advances and developments in robotics on the basis of their significance and quality. It is our hope that the wider...

By the dawn of the new millennium, robotics has undergone a major transformation in scope and dimensions. This expansion has been brought about by the maturity of the field and the advances in its related technologies. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics has been rapidly expanding into the challenges of the human world. The new generation of robots is expected to safely and dependably co-habitat with humans in homes, workplaces, and communities, providing support in services, entertainment, education, healthcare, manufacturing, and assistance. Beyond its impact on physical...

By the dawn of the new millennium, robotics has undergone a major transformation in scope and dimensions. This expansion has been brought about by the maturity of the field and the advances in its related technologies. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics has been rapidly expanding into the challenges of the human world. The new generation of robots is expected to safely and dependably co-habitat with humans in homes, workplaces, and communities, providing support in services, entertainment, education, healthcare, manufacturing, and assistance. Beyond its impact on physical...

Val is a girl raised in apartheid South Africa. Her family is financially well-off, there is an abundance of everything except harmony. As a child, she is hurt, as a teen insulted, and as a woman, abused and discarded. Haunted by her extreme obesity, Val slips into a world of reckless debauchery and alcoholism and substance abuse of all kinds. All other kinds discord ran like wild fire through her life in much the same destructive manner. Is there hope for her? Can she redeem herself? The only soul she can turn to is her childhood friend, who is in fact a local servant girl. Can her friend...

Culled from the symposium of the subtitle, this book showcases top-class research in experimental robotics, with the latest work in the field as well as discussion of future directions. It reflects ISER's goal of providing a forum for new ideas on robotics.

This research work is mainly focused on suspending the steel ball without any mechanical support in desired position and how the Magnetic Levitation System works in presence of disturbance with help of an efficient controller.The tracking performance and robustness is also checked for this system. For tracking, two type of reference trajectory are modelled. One is sine wave and other is a set of constant point varying at different levels. Lastly for robust performance, disturbance is applied in MLS.For this task we have designed Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Controller (IT2FLC), Interval...

Indian capital markets have been witnessed a major transformation and structural changes over the past one decade as a result of ongoing financial sector reforms initiated by the Government. This study investigated the lead lag relationship between the spot and futures equity market in India, both in terms of return and volatility, examines the lead lag relationship between the spot and futures markets for asymmetric information and also incorporate price co-integration relationship between spot and futures markets in the lead lag relationship analysis. We employed data in the study consists...

It is about fifteen years since we started hearing about Computational Ma terials Science and Materials Modelling and Design. Fifteen years is a long time and all of us realise that the use of computational methods in the design of materials has not been rapid enough. We also know the reasons for this. Mate rials properties are not dependent on a single phenomenon. The properties of materials cover a wide range from electronic, thermal, mechanical to chemical and electro-chemical. Each of these class of properties depend on specific phe nomenon that takes place at different scales or levels...