An Introduction to AI Robotics (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents)

Author: Robin R. Murphy List Price: $65.00 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0262133830 Publisher: MIT Press (13 November, 2000) Edition: Hardcover Sales Rank: 108,620 Average Customer Rating: 3.38 out of 5

Buy now directly from Amazon.com -

Customer Reviews

Dr. Choset's glowing review(s) might be taken with a grain of salt, given that he serves as "Director of Research Outreach" beneath the author at CRASAR.

While the language is suitable for a novice, it is plagued by errors both grammatical and technical. While the former (at roughly one per page) are merely distracting, the latter often incorrectly change the sense entirely.

Code snippets masquerade as "C or C++", but aren't suitable even as pseudo code. Luckily, most are trivial enough that mistakes become obvious, but missing cases and lack of any error handling whatsoever mean that you're not going to be typing examples into an editor. In addition, many assume a machine state but don't show this initialization. This might be excusable had the code been lifted directly from source, but half the time backslashes are used to begin comments!

A few examples from a chapter on vision:

"Consumer digital cameras post an analog signal, but the update rate is too slow at this time for real-time reactive robot control."

"Most commercial devices in the U.S. use a NTSC (television) standard. Color is expressed as the sum of three measurements: red, green, and blue."

"red = image_red[row][col];
red = image_green[row][col];
red = image_blue[row][col];
display_color(red, green, blue);"

"His Cybermotion robot was one of the first to navigate in hallways using vision; in this case, a technique known as a Hough (pronounced "huff") transform. In the early 1990's, with slow hardware, the robot could go 8 to 9 meters per second."

Hint: The robot platform isn't capable of going 1/10 that speed. Such mistakes are so common that one wonders whether she just couldn't be bothered to do the research and resorted to making it up.

This book may be okay for a casual read and it does have the endnotes going for it, but don't use it as a textbook unless you enjoy confusing students. If you're serious about behavior-based robotics, get Arkin.

Similar Products