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Title: An Introduction to AI Robotics (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents) by Robin R. Murphy ISBN: 0-262-13383-0 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 13 November, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $65.00

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Average Customer Rating: 3.56 (9 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: An excellent book
Comment: I wonder how the first reviewers gave so bad comments on the book. I think it is not the author but the first reviewers who mislead the readers. If I took their comments, I would miss a really excellent book.

The contents in this book are rich, entensive, systematic and well-organized. One of my colleagues borrowed it from me several times, and finally he ordered another copy himself!

We really appreciate the book and the author.

Rating: 1
Summary: Be careful.
Comment: Be careful, if you read this book and actually obtain any knowledge from it, Robin Murphy may try to sue you!

Rating: 1
Summary: Where's the editor?
Comment: This book is an unedited nightmare.

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.

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