Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations

The good news is that this book covers a range of topics in sufficient detail and accuracy to give students a good understanding of the topic. Here are some reasons I could not give it 5 stars. First, the book is uneven. Some details don't seem to really go any place (such as some of the advanced topics in configuration space). On the other hand, students what to know about SLAM, SLAM and well, more SLAM (I do not know if I agree with student here... ) Also what about multi-robot systems? Flying robots (are they mobile robots? ). Legged robots? Also, being an old-school trained robotics person, I thought the discussion kinematics and dynamics was inadequate and could be beefed up. Perhaps the authors felt that it would take them too far off the main theme? I don't know, but no D-H parameters? Really? The text has about 2x as many words as it needs to cover the same material. It could benefit from tighter editing to make the meaning clearer and the text less wordy. By way of analogy, in the software world K & R probably said everything there was needed to be said, in a concise way, about C. But, there are many much more wordy books out there.. Oh, and lets see what else.. ahh the algorithms presented. My feeling is that some may obfuscate rather than elucidate. However, given these defects, this book has a coverage which would be hard to match in several books, and I enjoyed reading it and learning from it...

At the outset one might expect this book to be pure about motion planning or motion control. In reality the book is remarkably comprehensive in coverage of perception, planning and control with in-depth coverage of basic kinematics, basic planning mechanisms and applied estimation such as Kalman filters for robot perception. The book was written/edited by the first authors with in-depth coverage in particular chapters by the other authors. In the end it is a very coherent, up-to-date and comprehensive book. The book is written to have enough detail for a 1 term senior under-graduate or junior graduate course in robotics or as a reference for practitioners. Truly a great book

This is a great book on mobile robotics, a lot of methods are explained in the book and its writing is clear and easy to understand. I have used it on several undergraduate and graduate courses that I have taken, I fully recommend it.