Chapter 1 covers the invention and growth of cellular telephone and associated wireless technologies, and how wireless proliferated throughout the world. Examples show how the first cellular and paging systems were engineered , and how roaming and frequency reuse enabled the mobile communications revolution.

Although the vast majority of mobile robotic systems involve a single robot operating alone in its environment, a growing number of researchers are considering the challenges and potential advantages of having a group of robots cooperate in order to complete some required task. For some specific robotic tasks, such as exploring an unknown planet [374], search and rescue [812], pushing objects [608], [513], [687], [821], or cleaning up toxic waste [609], it has been suggested that rather than send one very complex robot to perform the task it would more effective to send a number of smaller, simpler robots.

Before delving into the harsh realities of real robots, it is worthwhile exploring some of the computational tasks that are associated with an autonomous system. This chapter provides a taste (an amuse bouche, if you will) of some of the computational problems that will be considered in later chapters. Here, these problems are considered in their simplest form, and many of the realities of autonomous systems are ignored. Rest assured, the full complexity of the problems are considered in later chapters.

Given the current state of mobile robotics, what can be considered essentially solved and what tasks remain? It is clear that for restrictive environments and for limited tasks, autonomous systems can be readily developed. Tasks such as parts delivery in a warehouse, materials transport in hospitals, limited autonomous driving, and so on can all be “solved” for tight definitions of the task and provided that sometime restrictive assumptions can be made concerning the environment.

The role of the car is examined from the advent of the internal combustion engine (ICE) in the early 1900s (Benz and Daimler in Stuttgart, Olds and Ford in Detroit) to electric vehicles (EVs) in the past 2 decades (GM’s EV1, Toyota’s hybrid Prius, and Tesla’s Roadster). With over 1 billion cars on the road and annual sales of almost 100 million, 90% run on hydrocarbon combustion, EV propulsion is changing the rules of the road. By 2035, the sale of gasoline and diesel cars will end across Europe and other regions. Examples of electric propulsion are given, including cars, trucks, buses (especially China), marine transport, and airplanes, as are the challenges to electrify each sector (cost, range, weight, charging infrastructure). The competing technologies of lithium-ion batteries and hydrogen fuel cells are discussed.

Increased energy storage is needed to continue the green transition in transportation (chemical batteries, hydrogen) and the grid (gravitational, mechanical, thermal). Lithium supply chains and mining practices are discussed in Australia, China, the US, and South America (the so-called high-Andes “lithium triangle”). Load-management, distributed energy resources, and vehicle-to-grid technology are explained to recondition an aging one-directional grid, redefining consumer habits similar to early grid building.

Although many mobile robot systems are experimental in nature, systems devoted to specific practical applications are being developed and deployed. This chapter examines some of the tasks for which mobile robotic systems are beginning to appear and describes several existing experimental and production systems that have been developed.

For many tasks, a mobile robot needs to know “where it is” either on an ongoing basis or when specific events occur. A robot may need to know its location in order to be able to plan appropriate paths or to know if the current location is the appropriate place at which to perform some operation. Knowing “where the robot is” has many different connotations. In the strongest sense, “knowing where the robot is” involves estimating the location of the robot (in either qualitative or quantitative terms) with respect to some global representation of space: we refer to this as strong localization.

The use of machine learning in robotics is a vast and growing area of research. In this chapter we consider a few key variations using: the use of deep neural networks, the applications of reinforcement learning and especially deep reinforcement learning, and the rapidly emerging potential for large language models.

Chapter 3 focuses on the fundamental engineering principles used to design and deploy modern wireless communication systems. The assignment of radio channels in a mobile radio environment is presented, with considerations on co-channel and adjacent channel interference, and the approaches used to mitigate interference in a cellphone system. Repeaters, cell-splitting, micro-cells, and picocells are discussed, and trunking theory is introduced to demonstrate how capacity is computed in a mobile network with shared resources and in the face of interference.

Chapter 2 covers the early global cellphone and paging standards, and demonstrates the technical features of the first few generations of wireless communications technologies for both mobile and fixed use. The use of licensed and unlicensed bands is discussed, with a look at the global evolution of wireless standards.

Chapter 4treats the fundamentals of radio propagation path loss, also known as large-scale fading. A wide range of practical radio propagation models are presented, and the fundamental theories of reflection, scattering, and diffraction are presented with many examples. These propagation mechanisms give rise to level of coverage and interference experienced in any wireless network, and, in urban environments, it is shown how the radar cross-section and ray tracing models can give accurate prediction of large-scale path loss in a mobile communication system. Shadowing is also considered, and the log-normal distribution is found to describe the shadowing about the distance-dependent mean signal level. Statistical approaches to quantifying outage are provided.