| dc.description.abstract | In the last 25 years, the field of robotics has stimulated an increasing interest
in a wide number of scholars, and thus literature has been conspicuous, both
in terms of textbooks and monographs, and in terms of specialized journals
dedicated to robotics. This strong interest is also to be attributed to the interdisciplinary
character of robotics, which is a science having roots in different
areas. Cybernetics, mechanics, controls, computers, bioengineering, electronics
— to mention the most important ones — are all cultural domains which
undoubtedly have boosted the development of this science.
Despite robotics representing as yet a relatively young discipline, its foundations
are to be considered well-assessed in the classical textbook literature.
Among these, modelling, planning and control play a basic role, not only in the
traditional context of industrial robotics, but also for the advanced scenarios
of field and service robots, which have attracted an increasing interest from
the research community in the last 15 years.
This book is the natural evolution of the previous text Modelling and Control
of Robot Manipulators by the first two co-authors, published in 1995, and
in 2000 with its second edition. The cut of the original textbook has been
confirmed with the educational goal of blending the fundamental and technological
aspects with those advanced aspects, on a uniform track as regards a
rigorous formalism.
The fundamental and technological aspects are mainly concentrated in the
first six chapters of the book and concern the theory of manipulator structures,
including kinematics, statics and trajectory planning, and the technology of
robot actuators, sensors and control units.
The advanced aspects are dealt with in the subsequent six chapters and
concern dynamics and motion control of robot manipulators, interaction with
the environment using exteroceptive sensory data (force and vision), mobile
robots and motion planning. | en_US |
