Robotics Books

Thoroughly disgusted with this order. Thought I was ordering a kit to make some robots, but received two huge books for my grandson's birthday present. When I sent them back, I was charged $11.00 in postage and then did not receive my full refund because I did not fill out the correct papers which I never did see. Not happy at all with this! Did not get what I wanted and did not get my money back!

marion ferrari does it again! excellent addition in this series, and very in-depth explainations and complete instructions. great for the experienced builder, or anyone interested in this field.

Reviewer: Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics

When you pick this book up, it looks like a very promising exposition of computer face recognition. However, the best part of this book is its attractive dust cover. Large parts of the book are purely descriptive discussion. At the beginning, this discussion provides an overview of the challenges in this area, as well as many of the buzz words that might be useful for writing an inroduction to a proposal. However, most of the descriptive discussion is somewhat vague and lacks any real insight into what the problems are or how one may go about solving them. One hopes that when the writers get to quantifying things with some mathematics, things will get better, but they don't.

The first mathematical descriptions were so fuzzy and poorly motivated that I was discourage from reading farther. The authors throw around probabilities w/o clearly defining what they mean, variables that tax the reader to supply an explanation of what they represent, and changes in formalism that are just confusing. Quite possibly they know what they are talking about, but they owe the reader a much bettter explanation of what they are trying to say.

From a cursory review of the remainder of the book, it appeares to be a collection of various equations w/o much of an explanation on how these would be applied to the problem of face recognition.

After reading this book, you may be more familiar with the jargon of the subject, but not much closer to understanding face recognition

The book provides an excellent introduction to many areas of modern computer vision and machine learning. Although the book is primarily concerned with high-level vision problems such as face recognition, it provides a valuable compendium on a variety of algorithms and statistical techniques which have come into vogue over the last few years.
Complex topics such as statistical learning theory are explained very clearly and concisely with just the right amount of mathematics. The mathematical descriptions are of a kind familiar to anyone with a good science or engineering background, i.e. they are designed to provide insight and formal structure rather than endless proofs of pointless theorems.
I particularly liked the way in which the authors clearly formulate and motivate the key problems before presenting and comparing different solutions. Although somewhat expensive, this book is an excellent introduction and reference for anyone seriously interested in the subject.

I liked this book - lots of information; good background details; enough wit to be interesting on a dry subject

This is a high school level paper expanded with large print, wide margins and long citations of an encyclopedia. Why it was ever published I have no idea.

not as i expected to be

I love this book. Richard Buchi has a very fresh and unique approach to the subject that I find absolutely en-trancing. It is easy to get caught up in the theory as he builds it slowly, methodically, but elegantly. Most of all, the theory he builds is very beautiful and joyful to behold. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to expand their horizons and take a fresh magical journey into the world of finite automata and their algebras. Definitely not to be missed and very good "read". I wish everyone could have this book on their bookshelves.

At the time of publishing this book was excellant. But it is out of date for most new processes. If you want to use this book for researching the processes that you have, for safety, or for basic laser knowledge, then this book would be excellant for your needs. The writing is a bit tough to get through at first, but once you pick up most of the jargon it is becomes much easier to read. Once you get what you need from this book you will most likely have to get another that deals strictly to your process.

At the time of publishing this book was excellant. But it is out of date for most new processes. If you want to use this book for researching the processes that you have, for safety, or for basic laser knowledge, then this book would be excellant for your needs. The writing is a bit tough to get through at first, but once you pick up most of the jargon it is becomes much easier to read. Once you get what you need from this book you will most likely have to get another that deals strictly to your process.

there's never any examples or explanations of how to solve anything and it constantly says "refer to some figure from 2 chapters ago."

I"ll be very happy to read this book,batI hav"nt money to bay it.Last brutal war destroyed may busines.Plese send me one book,andI"ll read it and return on your address.Thank you Igor popov ,dipl.ing.

I am a graduate EE student. I thought that this book could be helpful in Control Systems course but it was a real pain to go through the book. The examples are not clear and too much theoretical. There is only one thing to say about this book, it is not for Electrical Engineers.

I strongly recommend this book to graduate students who are studying in the control field. It has very good examples and concise explanation of the subject. As I see, it is an alternative approach in the frequency domain.

The Printing of the book looks as if it was made on a copy machine such that the typeface is a little fuzzy. Other than the printing, the authorship of the book is well done will many theorems and proofs. This book is recommended for graduate students or anyone in academia. Practicing engineers will find it useful only if one can understand and appreciate such rigorous theory.

This book is definitely not well suited for use in a college engineering course. It is simply much too terse and does not present key concepts or ideas efficiently. I did myself a favor and bought Linear System Theory and Design by Chi-Tsong Chen, which is actually a surprisingly readable book. This book is not readable as a text book, I would recommend using it only as a reference.

...i have ever read.


Ms. Wood, with her new-labour, right-on attitude, has not the faintest idea how to relate anything in its proper historical context.
Snide, completely unnecessesary, asides belittling some of the most original thinkers of the past, only serve to highlight the author's ignorance.

This is an excellent book about man's attempts to become "TheNew Prometheus "i.e. the "Creator " of artificail Life through automatons and robots. This book goes into great detailabout such curiousities and mechanicalmarvels such as "The Chess Player" and 'the Digestive Duck". This book goes to great lenghts to explore the connections between Theology, Mathematicsand Sorcery and offers insights into how through the Ages the notion that Man Is A Machine was hotly debated and ridiculed and dismiised as a type of "Heresy".I applaud Ms. Wood for her very thorough research and offering facts to the reader so thattheycanquestion his or her own views of this very interesting subject.

I'm a professional computer scientist specialising in artificial intelligence. Charles Bowling comes across as well-educated and a clear and deep thinker in his tour through the history and philosophy of rational thought. Unfortunately, his style of writing takes some getting used to and he is far from good at explaining his original ideas, with the end result that I find the descriptions sufficiently inpenetrable that I can't work out if he's a genius or a crank. He may have had some fantastic ideas but, without having many spare hours to try to figure out what he's trying to say, it's hard to tell. If you come to his work without previous familiarity or some other assistance, I wish you luck, and if anyone can figure out how valuable his contribution is then please let us know!

I'm a professional computer scientist specialising in artificial intelligence. Charles Bowling comes across as well-educated and a clear and deep thinker in his tour through the history and philosophy of rational thought. Unfortunately, his style of writing takes some getting used to and he is far from good at explaining his original ideas, with the end result that I find the descriptions sufficiently inpenetrable that I can't work out if he's a genius or a crank. He may have had some fantastic ideas but, without having many spare hours to try to figure out what he's trying to say, it's hard to tell. If you come to his work without previous familiarity or some other assistance, I wish you luck, and if anyone can figure out how valuable his contribution is then please let us know!