Engng Applic. Artif. lntell. Vol. 4. No. 2, pp~ 157-16(1, 1991 0952-1976/91 $3.00+0.00 Printed in Great Britain Pergamon Prcss plc

Book Reviews

10th International Conference on Automated Deduction, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Subseries of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, edited by M. E. STICKEL. Springer, Berlin (1990). 688 pp., DM 92.00, ISBN No: 3-540-52885-7.

The book contains a collection of all 42 papers pre- sented at the l Oth International Conference on Automated Deduction held on 24-27 July at Kaiserslautern, Germany. It also contains descriptions of 20 implementations of automated deduction systems and abstracts of tutorials given at the conference.

The main bulk of the papers are devoted to algo- rithms and techniques aimed at improving certain specific aspects of automated theorem provers and proposing new kinds of deduction systems. As such, they require some knowledge of logic (or logic pro- gramming, at least) from the reader. However, for reading most papers a modest knowledge of logic should be enough.

As the papers represent the diversity of the field, it is hard to point to the main themes. It seems, however, that the issues treated most are parallelization of proof search, special unification algorithms and finding com- plete term rewriting systems for equational theories.

As to the applications side, the papers dealing with these issues concentrate mainly either on using auto- mated theorem proving in logic and algebra, or on program verification, logic programming and deductive databases. As can be expected, the applications are mainly of the experimental kind. "Real applications", interesting to engineers, seem to require further matur- ing of the field and a significant increase in the raw computing power available.

The two-page descriptions of 20 different theorem provers is an important and valuable part of the book, since this is one of the few places where one can get some overview of the existing theorem-proving systems, and the capabilities and limits of the current techniques and technology.

The abstracts of tutorials are very short (typically 15 lines of text) and as such are not intended to convey significant information.

The presented papers give a good overview of the current state of the art in various directions of auto- mated deduction. However, being a collection of con- ference papers, several important research directions are left uncovered. The book should be considered as a "high-end" treatment of the subject, and not suitable for introductory purposes. For people working in the field of automated deduction, functional or logic pro- gramming, the book is a must. For others, the book

could be of interest to those who are planning to use automated deduction systems in their applications, or are just curious about the advances in the field.

TANEL TAMMET Academy of Sciences, Tallinn

Foundations of Robotics: Analysis and Control, by TSUNEO YOSHIKAWA. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1990). 285 pp., £35.95, ISBN No: 0-262-24028-9.

One must be grateful to the publisher, the MIT Press, that this book, Foundations of Robotics has appeared in an English translation from its original Japanese publi- cation. Despite the fact that the author, Tsuneo Yoshikawa, places a great emphasis on the purely mathematical aspects, he writes in a most agreeable, clear, unpretentious style with constant emphasis on the way in which the theory succeeds in leading from the previous theories to the one under study.

Throughout the book the fundamental concepts and methodologies for analysis, synthesis, design, and control of robot manipulators are theoretically well supported. The author not only explains the physical meanings of the concepts and equations used, but he also provides, in an intuitively clear way, the necessary background in kinematics, kinetics, dynamics, linear algebra, use of manipulability ellipsoid and manipula- bility measure for dealing with configurations of robotic mechanisms, position and force control theory, and finally the redundant dof robot systems. Illustrative examples appear throughout the book and provide practical experience in the theoretically well-presented subjects.

The first chapter is an overview of typical robot manipulator mechanisms and their controllers, and is in many ways a model of what such an introduction should be. The next three chapters are devoted to the analysis of robot manipulator mechanisms. Chapter 2 covers the kinematics of robot manipulators, describing the motion of manipulator links, joints and objects related to manipulation, direct and inverse homogeneous transformation, Euler angles in comparison with roll- pitch-yaw wrist configurations. Translational and rota- tional velocity of objects is covered, as well as use of the Jacobian matrix to determine the relation between the end-effector velocity and joint velocity derived in a compact form.

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