Robot Modeling and Control, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 1INTRODUCTION

Robotics is a relatively young field of modern technology that crosses traditional engineering boundaries. Understanding the complexity of robots and their application requires knowledge of electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, systems and industrial engineering, computer science, economics, and mathematics. New disciplines of engineering, such as manufacturing engineering, applications engineering, and knowledge engineering have emerged to deal with the complexity of the field of robotics and factory automation. More recently, mobile robots are increasingly important for applications like autonomous vehicles and planetary exploration.

This book is concerned with fundamentals of robotics, including kinematics, dynamics, motion planning, computer vision, and control. Our goal is to provide an introduction to the most important concepts in these subjects as applied to industrial robot manipulators, mobile robots and other mechanical systems.

The term robot was first introduced by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek in his 1920 play Rossum’s Universal Robots, the word robota being the Czech word for worker. Since then the term has been applied to a great variety of mechanical devices, such as teleoperators, underwater vehicles, autonomous cars, drones, etc. Virtually anything that operates with some degree of autonomy under computer control has at some point been called a robot. In this text we will focus on two types of robots, namely industrial manipulators ...