Design Space Exploration in Robotics

This book provides a foundation of the overall cycle from design and modelling to implementation and control of unmanned systems, exhibiting autonomy and instantiating self-organization amidst disturbances, also functioning in uncertain and dynamic environments. The underlying assumption of the research path taken is that unmanned systems exhibiting attributes of autonomy, autonomous functionality, and resilience have to be considered as technically engineered systems. Hence, validation, verification, certification, and acceptance testing have to be provided together with the product robot capable of fulfilling a specific requirement. The key is to provide a mathematically sound metric to evaluate autonomy, autonomous functionality, and resilience, directly applicable to real complex engineering systems. This overarching approach, presented as a lecture script, is reaching out to provide an ethically aligned view on engineering, specifically aiming to support human's free will.