Search Results for: introduction

Digital images are everywhere: in your phone, on your hard drive, on the internet. We can access still pictures, movies and streams from live cameras all around the world. Let’s talk about digital images and how we can get them into the MATLAB environment where we can work on them.

Vision is a critically important sense for humans and, in fact, for almost all animals. If it’s useful to us then surely it would be a useful sensor for robots.

We will discuss some important non-technical aspects of robotics. What are the problems facing our society that robots might help to address? There are lots of tasks that robots could do, but should they? What are the ethical considerations around robots? Why are people scared of robots?

We will learn about the forces that are exerted on a robot’s joint by gravity acting on links, friction, and the coupling forces where the motion of one joint imparts a force on other joints.

We will learn about how we make the the robot joints move to the angles or positions that are required in order to achieve the desired end-effector motion. This is the job of the robot’s joint controller and in this lecture we will learn how this works. This journey will take us in to the […]

We will learn about the relationship, in 3D, between the velocity of the joints and the velocity of the end-effector — the velocity kinematics. This relationship is described by a Jacobian matrix which also provides information about how easily the end-effector can move in different Cartesian directions. To do this in 3D we need to […]

We will learn about the relationship, in 2D, between the velocity of the joints and the velocity of the end-effector — the velocity kinematics. This relationship is described by a Jacobian matrix which also provides information about how easily the end-effector can move in different Cartesian directions.

We introduce serial-link robot manipulators, the sort of robot arms you might have seen working in factories doing tasks like welding, spray painting or material transfer. We will learn how we can compute the pose of the robot’s end-effector given knowledge of the robot’s joint angles and the dimensions of its links.

We will learn about inverse kinematics, that is, how to compute the robot’s joint angles given the desired pose of their end-effector and knowledge about the dimensions of its links. We will also learn about how to generate paths that lead to smooth coordinated motion of the end-effector.

We will learn the essentials of inertial navigation, about sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers and how we can use the information they provide to estimate our motion and orientation in 3D space.