Foundations of Robotics presents the fundamental concepts and methodologies for the analysis, design, and control of robot manipulators. It explains the physical meaning of the concepts and equations used, and it provides, in an intuitively clear way, the necessary background in kinetics, linear algebra, and control theory. Illustrative examples appear throughout.

The author begins by discussing typical robot manipulator mechanisms and their controllers. He then devotes three chapters to the analysis of robot manipulator mechanisms. He covers the kinematics of robot manipulators, describing the motion of manipulator links and objects related to manipulation. A chapter on dynamics includes the derivation of the dynamic equations of motion, their use for control and simulation and the identification of inertial parameters. The final chapter develops the concept of manipulability.

The second half focuses on the control of robot manipulators. Various position-control algorithms that guide the manipulator's end effector along a desired trajectory are described Two typical methods used to control the contact force between the end effector and its environments are detailed For manipulators with redundant degrees of freedom, a technique to develop control algorithms for active utilization of the redundancy is described. Appendixes give compact reviews of the function atan2, pseudo inverses, singular-value decomposition, and Lyapunov stability theory.