| Date: 30 April 2011, 05:09
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This book is the nice result of a very fruitful multi-disciplinar work which involved
researchers from different areas and, sometimes, considerably different
approaches to similar problems. I use to tell my students that the benefits of
such an approach clearly outstand the possible drawbacks, such as the time taken
to explain to others concepts which are more or less straightforward for experts
in our area, and this work is a clear example of such a statement.
Dejan’s thesis was also a good example of a typical PhD student work path.
When he started working with me, I gave him a topic related to robotic task
modeling by discrete event systems. He actually did some work in that direction
and we even published a paper about it, but finally he felt he should get involved
in something that would provide a clear contribution for humankind, e.g., on
health-related issues. And so he did: motivated by some class work done with
Michael Athans and under the advice of Jorge Carneiro, he explored the immune
system world and managed to excite me about it as well. After the thesis and
the antithesis, the synthesis finally came when, one day, discussing his work,
we thought that exploring a mix of discrete event and continuous state space
time-driven modeling might be the right way to go to model cell population
dynamics. We even went back to Robotics, when we finally concluded that what
Dejan had developed could definitely be applied to the modeling and control of
robotic swarms!
Overall, it was a great experience to supervise Dejan and his enthusiasm about
his work. I hope this book will encourage others to pursue this research line, and
act as a showcase of our friendship.
Lisboa, Portugal Pedro U. Lima
February 2007
Foreword
At the dawn of the new millennium, robotics is undergoing a major transformation
in scope and dimension. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics
is rapidly expanding into the challenges of unstructured environments. Interacting
with, assisting, serving, and exploring with humans, the emerging robots will
increasingly touch people and their lives.
The goal of the new series of Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR) is
to bring, in a timely fashion, the latest advances and developments in robotics on
the basis of their significance and quality. It is our hope that the wider dissemination
of research developments will stimulate more exchanges and collaborations
among the research community and contribute to further advancement of this
rapidly growing field.
The monograph written by Dejan Milutinovi?c and Pedro Lima presents an
original theoretical framework in which both biological cell populations and
large-size mobile robot teams can be modeled and analyzed. This unique interdisciplinary
work has explored methods for discrete-event and time-continuous
systems, leading to useful results for modelling and control of robot swarms. As
such, the book has a wide interest for scholars in the area of multi-agent systems,
including computational biology, biomedical engineering, nanorobotics and even
aerospace engineering.
Remarkably, the doctoral thesis at the basis of this monograph was a finalist
for the Fifth EURON Georges Giralt PhD Award devoted to the best PhD thesis
in Robotics in Europe. A very fine addition to the series!
Naples, Italy Bruno Siciliano
March 2007 STAR Editor
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