Contents


Preface

*This book is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Pınar Boyraz Baykas, who passed away in November 2020. I wish to thank her for her work in this book, and for everything else she did in life as a person and a scientist. She will be missed very much, but will always* 

As a formal definition from "International Organization for Standardization", service robots are platforms that perform useful tasks for humans or equipment excluding industrial automation applications. From this perspective, the field of service robotics covers a very wide area including; personal care and assistance, agriculture, logistics, mobility, medical, and defense-oriented robots. All these types of robots may have different levels of autonomy, and they become smarter using artificial intelligence techniques day by day. Parallel to this improvement, the service robotics market has been growing very rapidly, especially during the last few years. With the development of the field of service robotics, the definition of social roles, labor, and jobs will change, some of them will become obsolete and some new ones will be introduced into our lives in the future. Since service robotics contains many types of robots, the variety of problems to be solved is also large. Many popular robotic problems, ranging from mechanism design to simultaneous localization and mapping SLAM, from motion planning to system security, can be examined in this context. This book intends to present the reader with the latest solutions for such research problems and innovative applications of different types

In Chapter 1, the authors detail three different enabling approaches for obtaining safe human-robot interactions with two main applications in medical and service robotics. These enablers are mainly joint mechanism designs using variablestiffness-actuators (VSA), hyper-redundant robotic platforms to improve shapecontrollability in narrow channels, and finally a smart-skin design for multi-modal perception of force, stretch, and pressure interactions to improve environmental

Application of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics technology has a huge impact in achieving independent mobility and enhances the quality of life for persons with disabilities. Chapter 2 is a survey of the known applications of AI to one of the segments of modern healthcare, namely the prosthetic and orthotic industry and in the field of assistive technology. The contents of this chapter cover the description of basic mathematical tools and technologies from AI that are suitable for the solution

Chapter 3 features both hardware and software design aspects and integration for a heavy-lift drone. The application has interesting end-use as it also integrates a robotic arm on the drone for repair, painting, surveillance and different tasks where

awareness and therefore intelligence of robotic platforms.

*remain in our hearts.*

of service robots.

of problems arising in this field.
