Preface

From earliest times, mankind has been searching for ways of convenient and fast travel and transport of goods. In ancient times people built various types of vehicles used to move through the lands, as well as boats and ships to move along the surface of the water and the oceans. It was not until the late nineteenth century that planes became means of transport. Currently, land, air, water surface, or underwater transport no longer represent a problem, but still new solutions are sought in these areas.

In the early period of the development of means of transport, manned vehicles were used, controlled by a well-trained man or group of people located on the vehicle. Since the 1950s we saw the development of remotely operated unmanned vehicles. Nowadays they are of‐ fering all the characteristic features of a robot: mobility and manipulation, the ability of the technical observation of the environment, and sometimes self-decision making especially in typical and repetitive situations. Unmanned vehicles have become the basic equipment of many companies, private and public institutions particularly active in military, police, and rescue, and are also at the disposal of research and development centers. Unmanned vehi‐ cles are used in various fields of human activity both on land and sea or air. In recent years, one of the main tasks carried out by unmanned vehicles are recognition and survey tasks, which became important in the security dimension, especially in terms of terrorist threats.

The development of autonomous vehicle began in the early 1960s. During this period, the main problem was the computer technology, which in the 1970s and 1980s was relatively undeveloped. The situation was similar to the mobile energy sources required for autono‐ mous operation of the vehicle. In the past almost 50 years, substantial progress was made in both areas. Currently, most developed and developing countries are working on few of their own autonomous vehicles, and some countries are developing technology borrowed from other countries. In most cases, these systems are built on behalf of the army and perform typical military missions, although gradual autonomous vehicle technology also comes from the civilian market. For example, offshore industry started to use autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) to support the work of drilling, which reduces labor costs in many areas of oil production.

Currently, the aim is to ensure that vehicles can realize a number of common tasks without human intervention, e.g., moving to a specified point in conditions of disruptions and re‐ strictions of trajectory, positioning at a given point, avoiding obstacles, retrieving data about the state of the environment etc. These efforts are manifested by permanent growth in usage of autonomous vehicles in the implementation of various tasks. In such scenarios, the opera‐ tor enters only superior orders, as the coordinates of the area of operation, the options of the work, orders to stop operations, etc., and the vehicle autonomously performs the task. Un‐ fortunately, giving vehicles or generally any technical device, features of autonomy raises some issues. They are primarily associated with the need to "teach" machine to think logi‐ cally, of course, in a limited range of the nature of the mission, as well as to make the right decisions in both typical and atypical situations. Currently, despite the attempts to give the machines features of artificial intelligence that should enable autonomous operations to a limited extent, this area is still being continuously developed, there are no concrete solutions that can be applied in real life, and there is still a lot to be done.

Autonomous vehicle technology is still being developed, which can be seen even with re‐ ports of attempts to construct biomechanical vehicles which are imitating the actions of ani‐ mals or even humans. Recently a new trend has appeared: concept of many autonomous vehicles collectively working together to pursue a specific tasks and achieve a common goal. This is considered the latest trend in the development of robotics.

In this book, scientists from research institutions and universities of various countries of the world present their achievements in the field of autonomous vehicles. According to the pre‐ sented messages, the impact of these vehicles on the improvement of human life is invalua‐ ble especially because of the wide field of its application. I hope that this book will provide closer insight on some of the problems related to the autonomy of various vehicles and will inspire further research in the field of robotics, in general.

> **Andrzej Zak** Polish Naval Academy Poland
