This book presents recent results in robot motion and control. Twenty papers presented at the Fourth International Workshop on Robot Motion and Control held in 2004 have been expanded. The authors of these papers were carefully selected and represent leading institutions in this field. The book covers nonlinear control of nonholonomic systems and legged robots as well as trajectory planning for these systems, topics not covered in previous books.

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

Dynamics; Feedback control; Trajectory planning; Compliance; Task planning.

Content Description #Includes bibliographical references.

One of the ultimate goals in Robotics is to create autonomous robots. Such robots will accept high-level descriptions of tasks and will execute them without further human intervention. The input descriptions will specify what the user wants done rather than how to do it. The robots will be any kind of versatile mechanical device equipped with actuators and sensors under the control of a computing system. Making progress toward autonomous robots is of major practical inter est in a wide variety of application domains including manufacturing, construction, waste management, space exploration, undersea work, as sistance for the disabled, and medical surgery. It is also of great technical interest, especially for Computer Science, because it raises challenging and rich computational issues from which new concepts of broad useful ness are likely to emerge. Developing the technologies necessary for autonomous robots is a formidable undertaking with deep interweaved ramifications in auto mated reasoning, perception and control. It raises many important prob lems. One of them - motion planning - is the central theme of this book. It can be loosely stated as follows: How can a robot decide what motions to perform in order to achieve goal arrangements of physical objects? This capability is eminently necessary since, by definition, a robot accomplishes tasks by moving in the real world. The minimum one would expect from an autonomous robot is the ability to plan its x Preface own motions.

Repetitive Motion Planning and Control of Redundant Robot Manipulators presents four typical motion planning schemes based on optimization techniques, including the fundamental RMP scheme and its extensions. These schemes are unified as quadratic programs (QPs), which are solved by neural networks or numerical algorithms. The RMP schemes are demonstrated effectively by the simulation results based on various robotic models; the experiments applying the fundamental RMP scheme to a physical robot manipulator are also presented. As the schemes and the corresponding solvers presented in the book have solved the non-repetitive motion problems existing in redundant robot manipulators, it is of particular use in applying theoretical research based on the quadratic program for redundant robot manipulators in industrial situations. This book will be a valuable reference work for engineers, researchers, advanced undergraduate and graduate students in robotics fields. Yunong Zhang is a professor at The School of Information Science and Technology, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China; Zhijun Zhang is a research fellow working at the same institute.

Robot Motion Control 2009 presents very recent results in robot motion and control. Forty short papers have been chosen from those presented at the sixth International Workshop on Robot Motion and Control held in Poland in June 2009. The authors of these papers have been carefully selected and represent leading institutions in this field. The following recent developments are discussed: design of trajectory planning schemes for holonomic and nonholonomic systems with optimization of energy, torque limitations and other factors, new control algorithms for industrial robots, nonholonomic systems and legged robots, different applications of robotic systems in industry and everyday life, like medicine, education, entertainment and others, multiagent systems consisting of mobile and flying robots with their applications. The book is suitable for graduate students of automation and robotics, informatics and management, mechatronics, electronics and production engineering systems as well as scientists and researchers working in these fields.