MECE4602 Introduction to Robotics

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This is an undergraduate/graduate level course intended to introduce students to Robotics. The course focuses on the fundamental aspects of robotics including: rigid body transformations (rotation matrices, screw representations), kinematics modeling of serial and parallel robots, inverse and direct kinematics, motion planning in joint and task space, robot dynamic modeling using Lagrange and Newton Euler recursive method, fundamentals of control for robotic systems.

Course Administration

This course is intended for undergraduate students and graduate students interested in robotics. Junior and senior level students and graduate students are encouraged to register for this class. The course requirements include few bi-weekly homework assignments, mid-term exam, and a term project designed to showcase the students' skills. More details on the breakdown of percentages will be provided through the official course syllabus.

Prerequisites

The prerequisites for this course include rigid-body physics and mathematics as a sophomore/junior level. Basic kinematics as covered in Theory of Machines course is advantageous, but not necessary. There will be an extensive use of methods from linear algebra and calculus. These topics will be reviewed and covered in class, but previous exposure to these topics is helpful. The course will also make extensive use of Matlab (Mathematica or Maple are acceptable too) for simulations and for homework sets. An introduction of the necessary Matlab tools will be given by the course instructors prior to each homework set.

Subjects covered in class

• Introduction to mechanisms and methods for the determination of degrees of freedom
• Introduction to rigid body kinematics: representation of velocities in moving frames (review)
• Mathematics of Rotations
• Classification of robotic architectures: serial, parallel, hybrid architectures.
• Mathematical modeling of the kinematics of serial robots and parallel robots: direct and inverse kinematics
• Differential kinematics: robot jacobians, statics of serial and parallel robots
• Kinematic/static singularities and their relationship to the robot Jacobian
• Kinematic and static performance measures: manipulability, condition number, kinematic conditioning index, dexterity.
• Resolved rates algorithms for serial robots (inverse kinematics)
• Path planning in joint and in task space
• Newton-Euler Dynamics of serial robots
• Euler-Lagrange Dynamic modeling of serial robots
• Introduction to Lyiaponov stability of dynamic systems
• Introduction to robot control
• Robot harware and sensors

Text books

The instructor will provide his own material throughout the lectures. There are plenty of robotics text books out there. Most of the introductory text books on robotics will cover a large portion of the material given in class. The following text book will be used in class:

• Robot Modeling and Control, Mark Spong, Seth Hutchinson, and Vijay Vidyasagar, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2006.

Other optional text books include:

1. A mathematical Introduction to robotic manipulation, R.M. Sastry, Zexiang Li, Shankar Sastry, CRC Press 1994.
2. Robot Analysis - the mechanics of serial and parallel manipulation, Lung-Wen Tsai, Johns Wiley and Sons Inc., 1999.
3. Fundamentals of Robotic Mechanical Systems: Theory, Methods and Algorithms,Jorge Angleles, 3rd edition, Springer, 2007.
4. Foundations of Robotics: analysis and control, Tuseno Yoshikawa, The MIT Press, 1990.