Applied Control of Manipulation Robots

The first book of the new, textbook series, entitled Applied Dynamics of Manipulation Robots: Modelling, Analysis and Examples, by M. Vukobratovic, published by Springer-Verlag (1989) was devoted to the problems of dynamic models and dynamic analysis of robots. The present book, the second in the series, is concerned with the problems of the robot control. In conceiving this textbook, several dillemas arouse. The main issue was the question on what should be incorporated in a textbook on such a complex subject. Namely, the robot control comprises a wide range of topics related to various aspects of robotics, starting from the syn thesis of the lowest, executive, control level, through the synthesis of trajectories (which is mainly related to kinematic models of robots) and various algorithms for solving the problem of task and robot moti on planning (including the solving of the problems by the methods of artificial intelligence) to the aspects of processing the data obtai ned from sensors. The robot control is closely related to the robot pro gramming (i. e. the development of highly-specialized programming lan guages for robot programming). Besides, numerous aspects of the con trol realization should be included here. It is obvious that all these aspects of control cannot be treated in detail in the frame of a text book.