Preface

Summary

It was at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Pasadena in 2008 when, over a beer, we decided to write an undergraduate textbook on robotics. Since 1996, Frank had been teaching robot kinematics to Seoul National University undergraduates using his own lecture notes; by 2008 these notes had evolved to the kernel around which this book was written. Kevin had been teaching his introductory robotics class at Northwestern University from his own set of notes, with content drawn from an eclectic collection of papers and books.

We believe that there is a distinct and unifying perspective to the mechanics, planning, and control for robots that is lost if these subjects are studied independently or as part of other more traditional subjects. At the 2008 meeting, we noted the lack of a textbook that (a) treated these topics in a unified way, with plenty of exercises and figures, and (b), most importantly, was written at a level appropriate for a first robotics course for undergraduates with only freshmanlevel physics, ordinary differential equations, linear algebra, and a little bit of computing background. We decided that the only sensible recourse was to write such a book ourselves. (We didn't know then that it would take us more than eight years to finish the project!)

A second motivation for this book, and one that we believe sets it apart from other introductory treatments on robotics, is its emphasis on modern geometric techniques. Often the most salient physical features of a robot are best captured by a geometric description. The advantages of the geometric approach have been recognized for quite some time by practitioners of classical screw theory. What has made these tools largely inaccessible to undergraduates – the primary target audience for this book – is that they require an entirely new language of concepts and constructs (screws, twists, wrenches, reciprocity, transversality, conjugacy, etc.), and their often obscure rules for manipulation and transformation. However, the mostly algebraic alternatives to screw theory often mean that students end up buried in the details of calculation, losing the simple and elegant geometric interpretation that lies at the heart of what they are calculating.