Six Degrees Of Freedom

Octogenarian aerospace engineer Peter Hughes identified 6 critical points in his life at which an important decision was required, and where the rest of his life could have been quite different, depending on that decision. In every case, he was completely free to make the decision. In Six Degrees of Freedom, Hughes reflects on a full lifetime, including several work environments, his contributions to the aerospace industry (including work on the Canadarm), a passion for applied mathematics, family life, business and entrepreneurship, travel experience, and medical science. In so doing, and through his wry humor, he provides the reader thoughtful insight and useful life and career lessons.

A funny and fast-paced novel about obsession and adventure, science experiments and parakeets, coding and container ships, Six Degrees of Freedom won the Governor General's Literary Award in its original French. Nicolas Dickner is a previous winner of Canada Reads for the novel Nikolski. "Brilliant, beautiful and poetic with moments of pure reading pleasure! You read it with a smile on your lips--it's a book that makes you happy." --Anne Michaud, Bernier et Cie, Radio-Canada Three characters, infinite paths to freedom... Lisa is a young woman whose longing for adventure is tethered by the demands of an eccentric mother and a father slowly succumbing to Alzheimer's. Lisa's friend Éric is an agoraphobic hacker who becomes independently wealthy before his eighteenth birthday. And Jay is a former computer pirate who's paying her debt to society, day by stultifying day, working for the RCMP in Montreal. But when Jay learns of the existence of the mysterious shipping container Papa Zulu, she begins a clandestine investigation to discover who made it disappear and what they are trying to hide.

A modern and unified treatment of the mechanics, planning, and control of robots, suitable for a first course in robotics.

In astonishing and unflinching detail, a noted science journalist explains how Earth's climate will be impacted with every degree of increase in global warming--and what can be done about it now.

The Six Degrees of Petrovitch Michael is an AI of incalculable complexity trapped under the remains of Oshicora tower. Petrovitch will free him one day, he just has to trust Michael will still be sane by the time he does. Maddy and Petrovitch have trust issues. She's left him, but Petrovitch is pretty sure she still loves him. Sonja Oshicora loves Petrovitch too. But she's playing a complicated game and it's not clear that she means to save him from what's coming. The CIA wants to save the world. Well, just America, but they'll call it what they like. The New Machine Jihad is calling. But Petrovitch killed it. Didn't he? And the Armageddonists tried to kill pretty much everyone by blowing the world up. Now, they want to do it again. Once again, all roads lead back to Petrovitch. Everyone wants something from him, but all he wants is to be free. . .

Robot interaction control is one of the most challenging targets for industrial robotics. While it would provide the robotic systems with a high degree of autonomy, its effectiveness is limited by the complexity of this problem and by the necessity of special sensors (six-dof force sensors). On the other hand, the control methodologies to be adopted for addressing this problem can be considered mature and well-assessed. All the known interaction control strategies (e.g. impedance, direct force control) are tackled and reshuffled in a geometrically consistent way for simplification of the task specification and enhancement of the execution performance. This book represents the first step towards the application of theoretical results at an industrial level; in fact each proposed control algorithm is experimentally tested here on an industrial robotic setup.

Focuses on acquiring spatial models of physical environments through mobile robots The robotic mapping problem is commonly referred to as SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping). 3D maps are necessary to avoid collisions with complex obstacles and to self-localize in six degrees of freedom (x-, y-, z-position, roll, yaw and pitch angle) New solutions to the 6D SLAM problem for 3D laser scans are proposed and a wide variety of applications are presented