Book Image

Artificial Vision and Language Processing for Robotics

By : Álvaro Morena Alberola, Gonzalo Molina Gallego, Unai Garay Maestre
Book Image

Artificial Vision and Language Processing for Robotics

By: Álvaro Morena Alberola, Gonzalo Molina Gallego, Unai Garay Maestre

Overview of this book

Artificial Vision and Language Processing for Robotics begins by discussing the theory behind robots. You'll compare different methods used to work with robots and explore computer vision, its algorithms, and limits. You'll then learn how to control the robot with natural language processing commands. You'll study Word2Vec and GloVe embedding techniques, non-numeric data, recurrent neural network (RNNs), and their advanced models. You'll create a simple Word2Vec model with Keras, as well as build a convolutional neural network (CNN) and improve it with data augmentation and transfer learning. You'll study the ROS and build a conversational agent to manage your robot. You'll also integrate your agent with the ROS and convert an image to text and text to speech. You'll learn to build an object recognition system using a video. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills you need to build a functional application that can integrate with a ROS to extract useful information about your environment.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Artificial Vision and Language Processing for Robotics
Preface

History of Robotics


Robotics stemmed from the need to create intelligent machines to perform tasks that were difficult for humans. But it wasn't called “robotics” at first. The term “robot” was coined by a Czech writer, Karel Čapek, in his work R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). It is derived from the Czech word robota, which means servitude and is related to forced labor.

Čapek's work became known worldwide, and the term “robot” did too, so much so that this term was later used by the famous teacher and writer Isaac Asimov in his work; he termed robotics as the science that studies robots and their features.

Here you can see a timeline of the important events that have shaped the history of robotics:

Figure 1.1: History of robotics

Figure 1.2: History of robotics continued

Figures 1.1 and 1.2 give a useful timeline of the beginnings and evolution of robotics.