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T he second edition of this book covers an impressively broad array of important topics in robotics and computer vision. The book’s presentation style is approachable and engaging, not dense nor intimidating, and the material should be accessible to most upper-level, undergraduate engineering and computer science students. Each chapter combines foundational material, historical vignettes, colorful figures, descriptions of current technology, and software examples to help the reader quickly grasp the context, main ideas, and applications; this approach makes the book an excellent reference source. A nice feature is that, for many sections, it is possible to flip directly to that section and grasp the key ideas without having to read all of the material that comes before it. Due to the breadth of the material covered, this book can be used as a textbook for multiple courses in robotics and computer vision. The text sacrifices some mathematical details and derivations in favor of an example-driven, learnby-doing treatment. Therefore, the instructor may wish to supplement the book with other sources that go into more detail on the fundamentals. In fact, the author encourages as much: “[The book] is best read in conjunction with standard texts, which do offer rigor and theoretical nourishment.” Fortunately, the “Further Reading” sections provided at the end of each chapter provide a good selection of concurrent study material. As stated in the preface, the freely available Matlab Robotics Toolbox and Machine Vision Toolbox “is a firstclass citizen in this book.” The book and the software complement each other in that the book serves as a tutorial for the software, and the software reinforces and brings to life the concepts presented in the book. The toolboxes feature a suite of animation capabilities ranging from simple, highlevel interfaces to relatively complex algorithms. With only a few lines of code, readers can test an algorithm, experiment with the effects of varying relevant parameters, generate visualizations of complex 3D movements, illustrate the results of image-processing transformations, and more. The choice of the cross-platform and widely used Matlab environment (together with its extensive visualization tools) makes the software immediately accessible to students from many different backgrounds. However, it is worth noting that much of the functionality of the Matlab toolboxes is provided by other free libraries that are more commonly used in modern robotics software development. The popularity of the Robot Operating System (ROS) has resulted in several libraries evolving to the point of near standardization in robotics applications. For example, in the realm of kinematics and dynamics, tools such as Eigen, Bullet, and KDL are heavily used in ROS. The Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL) has become extremely popular thanks, in part, to the fact that the ROS application MoveIt! leverages OMPL planning algorithms out of the box. For mobile robot navigation, numerous tools for localization, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and planning have been released as ROS packages, including the navigation stack, hector_slam, Google Cartographer, RGBDSLAM, slam_karto, and frontier_exploration. In computer vision, OpenCV is ubiquitous in both the ROS and general computer vision worlds. The Gazebo and rviz simulation and visualization tools are used by researchers worldwide. The book does not attempt to document the relationship between the Matlab toolboxes and these other popular free libraries. These other libraries generally require the use of the Linux operating system and programming in C++ and Python, however. This creates a barrier for many new students, particularly those who may only take one or two courses in robotics and cannot invest the time to become proficient in a new operating system or programming language. Another advantage of the book’s Matlab code is that Corke himself maintains the toolboxes, thereby ensuring the consistency and high pedagogical value of the I EEE Control Systems welcomes suggestions for books to be reviewed in this column. Please contact either Scott R. Ploen, Hong Yue, or Thomas Schon, the associate editors for book reviews.