Guiding vector fields for robot motion control. With a foreword by Bruno Siciliano (Q6136224)

The monograph under review is based on the author's doctorial thesis in which extensive theoretical results and applications of guiding vector fields for robot motion control are presented. It contains 11 chapters and an appendix. After the Introduction where the basic idea of t the book is given, the main chapters are: Vanishing Level Value and Convergence To Zero-Level Set; Topological Analysis of Vector-Field Guided Path Following on Manifolds; Refined Dichotomy Convergence in Vector-Field Guided Path-Following on \(\mathbb R^n\); Guiding Vector Fields for Multi-robot Coordinated Navigation; A Singularity-Free Guiding Vector Field for Robot Navigation; Path Following Control in 3D Using a Vector Field; The Domain of Attraction of the Desired Path in Vector-Field Guided Path Following; Guiding Vector Fields for Following Occluded Paths; A Singularity-Free Guiding Vector Field for Robot Navigation; Guiding Vector Fields for Multi-robot Coordinated Navigation and the final one Conclusions and Future Research. Introducing guiding vector fields on Euclidean spaces and Riemannian manifolds the book provides rigorous theoretical guarantees of vector field guided motion control of robotic systems, and elaborates on the practical implementation of the proposed algorithms on mobile wheeled robots and fixed-wing aircraft. It provides guidelines for robotic tasks including path-following navigation, obstacle-avoidance, nonlinear guidance, stability, multi-robot motion coordination, etc. The book is an useful reading for students and scientists and should be of interest to practicing and research engineers as well as Ph.D students in the field of robotics and control theory.