Principles of Robot Motion, a new textbook written by a team headed by Associate Professor of Robotics Howie Choset, was published last week by MIT Press. Robotics Institute Project Scientist George Kantor and Robotics PhD alumnus Kevin Lynch are among the other co-authors. Principles of Robot Motion is the next textbook for the motion planning field, where the only other textbook, written by Stanford Professor Jean-Claude Latombe, was written in 1991. According to Choset, his team's textbook reflects the expanded notion of motion planning to encompass more fields, including emerging ones that did not exist when the first textbook was written.

"This will be the standard textbook for the motion planning field," said Choset. "People have always dreamed of building intelligent machines to perform tasks. With this publication, students studying robotics will have one more powerful tool to help them achieve this goal"

"Although journal and conference papers in motion planning have proliferated, there has not been any comprehensive reference text in more than a decade," said Latombe, "This book fills this gap in outstanding fashion and will serve well the growing community of students, researchers, and engineers interested in the field."

Other co-authors of the book include: Wolfram Burgard, a former visitingscholar with the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery (CALD), now a professor of computer science at the University of Freiburg; and Sebastian Thrun, former associate professor, CALD, now director of Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Lynch is now an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern University. Seth Hutchinson is Professor in the Department ofElectrical and Computer Engineering, University ofIllinois at Urbana-Champaign and Lydia Kavraki is Professor of Computer Science and Bioengineering, Rice University.

Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations
Howie Choset, Kevin M. Lynch, Seth Hutchinson, George Kantor,Wolfram Burgard, Lydia E. Kavraki and Sebastian Thrun
MIT Press, June 2005