Robotics: Modelling, Planning and Control

This volume provides the basic know-how on the foundations of robotics: modeling, planning, and control. It uniquely blends and clearly develops fundamental and technological topics in twelve chapters, with a gradually increasing level of complexity. In addition, it presents a wide variety of relevant problems and introduces and explains, step-by-step, the proper tools to find engineering-oriented solutions. Fundamental coverage includes kinematics, statics and dynamics of manipulators, trajectory planning and motion control in free space. Technological aspects include actuators, sensors, hardware- and software-control architectures and industrial robot-control algorithms. More than 60 examples and case studies are carefully worked out and interwoven through the text, with frequent resort to simulation. In addition, more than 100 end-of-chapter exercises are proposed, and the book is accompanied by an online solutions manual containing the MATLAB code for computer problems.