Search Results for: robot

We consider the most general type of serial-link robot manipulator which has six joints and can position and orient its end-effector in 3D space.

Self-driving cars are in the news a lot lately. An alternative way to think of such cars is as robots that carry people.

We have a deep fascination with machines created in our own image. Let’s explore the world of humanoid robots.

Humans have long been fascinated by machines that mimic people and animals. These and several other technologies are the precursors of modern robots.

Vision is useful to us and to almost all forms of life on the planet, perhaps robots could do more if they could also see. Robots could mimic human stereo vision or use cameras with superhuman capability such as wide angle or panoramic views.

We like robots but there’s also an element of fear, perhaps stoked by all those books and movies about our new robot overlords. I’m going to speculate a little about where the fear comes from.

In a serial-link manipulator arm each joint has to support all the links between itself and the end of the robot. We introduce the recursive Newton-Euler algorithm which allows us to compute the joint torques given the robot joint positions, velocities and accelerations and the link inertial parameters.

A robot joint controller is a type of feedback control system which is an old and well understood technique. We will learn how to assemble the various mechatronic components such as motors, gearboxes, sensors, electronics and embedded computing in a feedback configuration to implement a robot joint controller.

A robot manipulator may have any number of joints. We look at how the shape of the Jacobian matrix changes depending on the number of joints of the robot.

We revisit the simple 2-link planar robot and determine the inverse kinematic function using simple geometry and trigonometry.