Foreword

In our accelerated world it has become usual to collect developments from several distinct research groups on a same subject and compose it in a book. There is a lot more chance to fit this cooperative action in the usual available time schedule of authors and editors. It will not exactly substitute a lecture book intended to support a course, but it will be a unique chance to gather an insight in results that reflect the state of the art of that area.

It is full merit of the editors to offer a uniform prospective, that will juxtapose results from groups of different origins and countries covering the area that gives name to the book and in spite of being heterogeneous in nature will give a homogeneous view on the way problems are handled.

Focusing on intelligent transportation vehicles the editors Dutra from Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Lengerke from Bucaramanga (Colombia) organized the work in 9 chapters, with authors from Spain, Mexico, U.S. besides Brazil and Colombia. They work in research groups in Universities, Industries and research centers. The chapters reflect the modern tendency of a higher level of automation of processes and handles aspects of traffic information and vehicle communication, including motion planning, localization, clustering techniques, control of automated guided vehicles and task control, besides examples of a fire fighting robot and route planning in intelligent warehouses.

The text is made more accessible as research papers in stile and explanations and it is of value to get a good insight in this area of Mechatronics.