After successful completion of the course, students are able to...

• understand the structure and the individual components of robot control architectures.
• compare the most common sensors and actuators in robotics.
• compute the forward and inverse kinematics of different robot systems, in particular of serial manipulators and robots with parallel kinematics.
• describe and compute the the equations of motion (dynamics) of a robot manipulator.
• extend the dynamical model by kinematic constraints and contact transitions.
• solve elementary control problems for robots in configuration- and task-space.
• apply the above contents to kinematically redundant robots.

Overview of robot systems and control architectures, basics of sensors and actuators in robotics, kinematics and dynamics of a rigid-body, recursive algorithms for computation of the kinematics and dynamics of serial kinematic chains, DH-parameters, product of exponentials formula, inverse kinematics, computation of robot dynamics via Lagrangian framework and recursive Newton/Euler algorithms, modeling of kinematic constraints and contact transitions, modeling of robots with parallel kinematics as well as mobile robots, control in configuration- and task-space, introduction to force and impedance control, kinematics and dynamics of kinematically redundant robots.

The contents of this lecture are elaborated and discussed based on written lecture notes. The material is presented on the blackboard and with slides. To deepen, reinforce, and practically apply the material, two laboratory exercises will be conducted with simulations and experiments using the software Matlab/Simulink.

The evaluation consists of two lab exercises and a final oral exam. The positive completion of the exercises is the prerequisite for the registration for the oral exam. The grades of the lab exercises account for 25% of the total evaluation.

Lecture Notes

Basics of linear algebra, stability analysis of linear systems in time-domain