Search

Reviews the book "Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801-1885," by Judith A. McGaw.

Reviews the book `Ethnic Minorities in the Modern Nation State,' by John Rex.

This book is a compilation of papers presented at the 1st Robotics Europe Conference, Brussels, June 27-28, 1984. Robotics Europe is the Industrial Robotics Standardization Europe--an EEC-based organization supported within the framework of the Information Technologies Program of the European Community. It was founded in June 1982, has 35 members (all from the European community), and is organized into five subgroups working in the following areas: health and safety aspects of industrial robots, industrial robot technology, industrial robot programming systems, industrial robot communications and interfaces, and performance testing of industrial robots. Robotics Europe seeks to increase the awareness, development and application of industrial robots, pool resources, and exchange information within and outside the EEC, advise the commission of the European Communities on robot-related topics, provide an essential link between the EEC Commission and the international and national standards organizations within Europe involved in the standardization of robotics and associated technologies, and to provide one of the links between the EEC Commission, the United States, and Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current book contains eleven papers describing recent work by some of the leading contributors to the rise of nonholonomic motion planning and is based on talks presented at a workshop held during the 1991 IEEE Robotics and Automation Conference. About half of the papers are devoted to the control of nonholonomic systems; including a new paper by Murray and Sastry on control using sinusoidal steering. There is also a long and interesting paper by Jacobs and Canny on vehicle path planning using Dubins' minimal length curves, along with a useful survey of the entire field by Laumond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Johannssen's paper is perhaps the most accessible to the non-specialist, requiring no detailed knowledge of VLSI theory and jargon. Naturally, he perpetrates the myth that all VLSI research takes place in California, but despite that the paper is a good overview of one of the most overclaimed areas in high technology research over the past decade. His conclusions are hardly news to those involved, but the article is well worth seeking out. The other invited presentations from Charles Leiserson ("Parallel Supercomputing"), John Hennessy ("RISC Architectures''), Bob Brodersen ("VLSI Signal Processing") and H. T. Kung ("More on Supercomputing") are either much shorter, or much more like conventional research articles than reviews. It is, of course, useful to have statements from figures such as these collated in a single volume, but none has picked up the retrospective issue as well as has Johanssen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the problem of planning paths for robots has been a subject of serious study for more than a decade, this book is the first attempt to cover the field with a textbook. In fact, Latombe has tackled an even broader field here, as he defines motion to include robot motions that alter the arrangement of world objects in a required manner, thus including problems such as grasp planning, multirobot planning, and planning with uncertainty. The number of research papers that have been devoted to these areas goes some way to explaining the weight of the resulting volume, amounting to more than 600 pages of text and almost 40 pages of references. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the book "The Practice of British Geology, 1750-1850," by Hugh S. Torrens.