Content in short: The course consists of twenty lectures and suggests an introduction to fundamentals of robotics. It includes elements of modeling (kinematics, dynamics, motion planning) of mechanical systems, introduction to problems in computer vision as well as a comprehensive discussion of control methods used for various robotics applications.

Topics in Kinematics: description of position and orientation of rigid bodies, the Denavit-Hartenberg convention, forward and inverse kinematics for industrial manipulators, the velocity transformations, singularities, kinematics for vehicles and mobile robots.

Topics in Dynamics: dynamics of rigid bodies, reference frames in relative motion, equations of motion for manipulators and vehicles in closed and recursive form, elasticity

Topics in Motion Planning:point-to-point motions, interpolation and path primitives, localization of robots, mapping a robot environment, planning trajectories for mechanical systems with passive degrees of freedom

Topics in Control: feedback linearization, passivity based controllers, position and force control.

Audience: The course can be of interest for graduate students and researchers in the subjects of Robotics, Mechatronics, Control. Lectures and exercises require only basic knowledge of mechanics and control theory as well as basic familiarity with Matlab/Simulink.

The textbook for the course is: M.W. Spong, S. Hutchinson, M. Vidyasagar. `Robot Modeling and Control.’ John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 0-471-64990-2

This course has been taught for several years (2008, 2009, 2010) at the Umea University (SWEDEN) and the NTNU (NORWAY)