Introduction to Robotics

Catalog description

Robotics is a relatively young field of modern technology that crosses traditional engineering boundaries. Understanding the complexity of robots and their applications 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. This course is concerned with fundamentals of robotics, including kinematics, dynamics, motion planning, computer vision and control. The goal is to provide a complete introduction to the most important concepts in these subjects as applied to industrial robot manipulators, mobile robots and other mechanical systems. A complete treatment of the discipline of robotics would require several courses. Nevertheless, at the present time, the majority of robot applications deals with industrial robot arms operating in structured factory environments so that a first introductory course must include a rigorous treatment of such robots.