Page 52 - Sensing, Intelligence, Motion : How Robots and Humans Move in an Unstructured World

CHAPTER 2

A Quick Sketch of Major Issues
in Robotics

Personally I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
—Winston Churchill

The material in this chapter is given primarily as a review and is structured quite
similar to such reviews elsewhere (see, for example, Ref. 6). Some sections—in
particular, Sections 2.5 and 2.6—are only tangentially relevant to our main topic
of sensor-based motion planning, so they can be just glanced through or skipped
by those who have had some introductory course in robotics. Those who have
not are suggested to go through this chapter more carefully.
Robotics is a multidisciplinary field. It deals with a multiplicity of issues, and
its tools relate to various disciplines, from mechanical engineering to computer
science to mathematics to human factors. The issues covered in this chapter relate
to generating a desired motion—that is, motion that would bring the robot to
the right destination, with acceptable dynamics and collision-free. Addressing the
reader who knows little about robotics, our goal is to give at least a perfunctory
understanding of areas that relate to motion planning. Besides those, other areas
may be as essential to a designer of robotic systems: object manipulation (e.g.,
design of hands and appropriate intelligence); grasping, which in turn divides into
precision grasping and power grasping (think of the difference between holding
a pen or an apple); robot (computer) vision, and so on. The list of issues that we
are about to review is as follows:
• Kinematics
• Statics
• Dynamics
• Feedback control
• Compliant motion
• Trajectory modification
• Motion planning and collision avoidance; navigation
Sensing, Intelligence, Motion, by Vladimir J. Lumelsky
Copyright  2006 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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