This book presents the most recent research advances in the theory, design, control, and application of robotic systems, which are intended for a variety of purposes such as manipulation, manufacturing, automation, surgery, locomotion, and biomechanics.

This is the proceedings of ARK 2018, the 16th International Symposium on Advances in Robot Kinematics, that was organized by the Group of Robotics, Automation and Biomechanics (GRAB) from the University of Bologna, Italy. ARK are international symposia of the highest level organized every two years since 1988. ARK provides a forum for researchers working in robot kinematics and stimulates new directions of research by forging links between robot kinematics and other areas.The main topics of the symposium of 2018 were: kinematic analysis of robots, robot modeling and simulation, kinematic design of robots, kinematics in robot control, theories and methods in kinematics, singularity analysis, kinematic problems in parallel robots, redundant robots, cable robots, over-constrained linkages, kinematics in biological systems, humanoid robots and humanoid subsystems.

The second edition of this book would not have been possible without the comments and suggestions from students, especially those at Columbia University. Many of the new topics introduced here are a direct result of student feedback that helped refine and clarify the material. The intention of this book was to develop material that the author would have liked to have had available as a student. Theory of Applied Robotics: Kinematics, Dynamics, and Control (2nd Edition) explains robotics concepts in detail, concentrating on their practical use. Related theorems and formal proofs are provided, as are real-life applications. The second edition includes updated and expanded exercise sets and problems. New coverage includes: components and mechanisms of a robotic system with actuators, sensors and controllers, along with updated and expanded material on kinematics. New coverage is also provided in sensing and control including position sensors, speed sensors and acceleration sensors. Students, researchers, and practicing engineers alike will appreciate this user-friendly presentation of a wealth of robotics topics, most notably orientation, velocity, and forward kinematics.

The author has maintained two open-source MATLAB Toolboxes for more than 10 years: one for robotics and one for vision. The key strength of the Toolboxes provide a set of tools that allow the user to work with real problems, not trivial examples. For the 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 —instant gratification in just a couple of lines of MATLAB code. 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. The purpose of this book is to expand on the tutorial material provided with the toolboxes, add many more examples, and to weave this into a narrative that covers robotics and computer vision separately and together. The author shows how complex problems can be decomposed and solved using just a few simple lines of code, and hopefully to inspire up and coming researchers. The topics covered are guided by the real problems observed over many years as a practitioner of both robotics and computer vision. It is written in a light but informative style, it is easy to read and absorb, and includes a lot of Matlab examples and figures. The book is a real walk through the fundamentals of robot kinematics, dynamics and joint level control, then camera models, image processing, feature extraction and epipolar geometry, and bring it all together in a visual servo system. Additional material is provided at http://www.petercorke.com/RVC

A modern and unified treatment of the mechanics, planning, and control of robots, suitable for a first course in robotics.

Climbing robot is a challenging research topic that has gained much attention from researchers. Most of the robots reported in the literature are designed to climb on manmade structures, but seldom robots are designed for climbing natural environment such as trees. Trees and manmade structures are very different in nature. It brings different aspects of technical challenges to the robot design. In this book, you can find a collection of the cutting edge technologies in the field of tree-climbing robot and the ways that animals climb. It provides a valuable reference for robot designers to select appropriate climbing methods in designing tree-climbing robots for specific purposes. Based on the study, a novel bio-inspired tree-climbing robot with several breakthrough performances has been developed and presents in this book. It is capable of performing various actions that is impossible in the state-of-the-art tree-climbing robots, such as moving between trunk and branches. This book also proposes several approaches in autonomous tree-climbing, including the sensing methodology, cognition of the environment, path planning and motion planning on both known and unknown environment.

The authors' of this book focus on the latest developments in robot kinematics and motion planning. The first chapter seeks to identify the governing rules implemented in the central nervous system (CNS) to solve redundant mapping problems from an experimental observation approach. The novelty of this chapter is in the obtained motion planning results for a constraint elbow joint during reaching movements. The second chapter focuses on the problems that exist in the two-norm and infinity-norm and solutions to these problems involving bi-criteria (BC) motion planning schemes of different joint-level vectors. In the third chapter, trajectory generation methods for the application of thermal spraying processes are introduced. In the fourth chapter, an investigation on the robot kinematics is proposed to find the rules of motion in an application case. The results demonstrate the motion behavior of each axis in the robot that consequently permits the identification of the motion problems in the trajectory. In the fifth chapter, kinematic properties of a new planar parallel manipulator is investigated by means of the theory of screws.