Robotic Welding, Intelligence and Automation

Citation

Norberto Pires, J. (2009), "Robotic Welding, Intelligence and Automation", Industrial Robot, Vol. 36 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2009.04936bae.005

Robotic Welding, Intelligence and Automation

Robotic Welding, Intelligence and Automation

Article Type: Book review From: Industrial Robot: An International Journal, Volume 36, Issue 2

Tzyh-Jong Tarn, Shan-Ben Chen and Changjiu ZhouSpringerSeptember 2007$149.00562 p.ISBN: 978-3-540-73373-7Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences, Vol. 362, www.springer.com/engineering/book/978-3-540-73373-7

This book is dedicated to new advancements on robotic welding. That is a relevant area, very important for the world economy that deserves the attention of researchers and engineers from several areas like: engineering, robotics, materials, control, automation, sensor technology, programming methods, etc. The general idea is to make welding easier for the operators, which means more automation and robotics, more high-level programming and better human-machine interfaces.

This book is not really a book. It is a collection of papers selected from the 2006 International Conference on Robotic Welding, Intelligence and Automation, i.e. it is an optimized version of the proceedings of the conference, probably better organized. The editors divided the contributions in five parts: intelligence for robotics, intelligent techniques for robotic welding, vision and control, overview on new intelligent control techniques.

The papers presented and reasonably interesting, although going through a book like this is somehow tedious since papers have their own type of organization, and a collection of them, with so many introductions and basic information, is not really nice to read. Nevertheless, for persons researching in the area this could be of interest, since it makes a good coverage of the selected areas. But, I must say that some papers are really out of the scope of the book, since they cover other areas that are not easily related with the main focus: intelligent robotic welding.

For the future, books like this should have sections which must be preceded with an introduction and brief overview of the subject area and the selected papers. The selected papers must be checked to remove the unnecessary introduction and definitions, making them similar to subsections. This would make the book more interesting to read and follow. Each section should end with some conclusions and editors notes.

The book was fairly interesting to follow and explore, which makes it a good thing to buy, although it seems a little bit boring for persons that are not really working in the area. For those, several other options from the same publisher (Springer) are available that can fulfill the job of introducing the subject and making an overview of current and future developments more easily and in a more pleasant way.

J. Norberto PiresUniversity of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal