Autonomous Mobile Robots and Multi-Robot Systems

Preface

In the famous lecture “The question concerning technology,”¹ Martin Heidegger argues that (p. 12):

Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of the truth.

And, certainly, robotics is not an exclusion. While the things are the material implementations of mathematical abstractions, the robots, and especially mobile robots and mobile robot systems, imply our imagination of motion.

Attempts at creating tools that can autonomously execute certain tasks can be tracked back to the ancient Greek philosophers and Egyptian inventors. In the Middle Ages and then in the new era, such mechanisms were enriched with mobile devices mimicking animals and humans, and the first efforts of building flying machines were conducted. Certainly, with the invention of steam and gasoline engines and electric motors, these devices became more complicated; however, despite the fact that even the simplest of them demonstrate all the main features of the modern machinery, none of them can be considered as a robot² in its modern sense.

The modern history of robotics began in the late 1940s, when slave arm manipulators were used in nuclear manufacturing. Following Bernard Roth³ (p. V):

The first academic activity was the thesis of H. A. Ernst, in 1961, at MIT. He used a slave arm equipped with touch sensors, and ran it under computer control. The idea in his study ...