Introduction to AI robotics
by Robin Murphy
Murphy's foundational textbook on AI robotics, covering the hierarchical, reactive, and hybrid paradigms that organize intelligence in robots.
"A robot is not a machine that thinks. It is a machine that acts in the world — and that changes everything.".
Editorial Summary
This textbook offers a comprehensive survey of artificial intelligence algorithms and programming organization for robot systems, enabling readers to design and evaluate artificially intelligent robots for sensing, acting, planning, and learning applications. Robin R. Murphy contrasts AI and engineering approaches while introducing the three paradigms of AI robotics: hierarchical, reactive, and hybrid deliberative/reactive. The Texas A&M University Raytheon Professor and founding director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue includes case studies showing how concepts were implemented on real robots, making this distinct from purely theoretical AI texts. The book covers locomotion, simultaneous localization and mapping, human-robot interaction, machine learning, and ethics, establishing it as a foundational resource for understanding how artificial intelligence principles apply to autonomous robotic systems.
Perspective
"This textbook gives you the algorithmic and architectural vocabulary to understand how robots actually reason about the world — Murphy's case studies ground abstract AI principles in physical systems that have to work in messy, real environments. The distinctive contribution is the three-paradigm framework (hierarchical, reactive, hybrid), which gives students a conceptual map for evaluating any robotic system's design rather than just learning to implement specific algorithms. Engineers and researchers moving from software AI into embodied systems will find this the clearest bridge between AI theory and robotics practice."
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