Robotics and Control

This textbook provides a tutorial introduction to robotics: mobile robots and robot manipulator arms. It is written in a light but informative narrative style, and includes many figures and MATLAB examples. The book starts with the fundamentals of pose representation and time varying pose. For mobile robotics it covers vehicle motion models, control, path planning, localization and mapping. For robot manipulators it covers forward, inverse and differential kinematics, and dynamics.

The Robotics Toolbox for MATLAB is free and open software that enables the reader to easily bring the algorithmic concepts into practice and work with real, non-trivial, problems. For the beginning student the book makes the algorithms accessible, the Toolbox code can be read to gain understanding, and the examples illustrate how it can be used. The code can also be the starting point for new work, for researchers or students, by writing programs based on Toolbox functions, or modifying the Toolbox code itself.