Practical Robotics Kinematics with Libraries and APIs: A Real World Engineers Guide (Robotics Engineering and Intelligence) - Softcover

Thomas, Gareth

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798268326888

Publisher: Independently published, 2025

Synopsis

💡 Note: This book is written for serious engineers and researchers who want rigorous, high-level technical insight. It’s dense, detailed, and assumes prior familiarity with advanced concepts.
If you value precision, depth, and professional-grade explanations—you’ll find this book indispensable.

Robotics is no longer science fiction. It’s the factory floor, the hospital ward, the warehouse, the startup garage. Robots are here, and the engineers who know how to move them — quickly, efficiently, profitably — are the ones who win.

But here’s the brutal truth: kinematics will make or break you.
Most engineers waste weeks “reinventing the wheel” — coding equations by hand, wrestling with coordinate frames, chasing phantom bugs in solvers that don’t converge. Meanwhile, projects stall, managers get frustrated, and deadlines slip.

You don’t have time for that. And you don’t need to.

This book hands you the shortest path between theory and practice. It’s not an abstract math textbook, and it’s not a glossy magazine overview. It’s a field manual for working engineers. Inside, you’ll discover:

• Why nobody codes kinematics from scratch anymore — and how the pros stand on the shoulders of proven libraries.

• The real trade-offs between MoveIt, KDL, Pinocchio, Drake, PyBullet, and MuJoCo — strengths, weaknesses, and when each one will save (or sink) your project.

• How to get your development environment set up without version hell or endless “it works on my machine” nightmares.

• Step-by-step guides for forward and inverse kinematics, Jacobians, mobile robots, and simulation-first workflows — all grounded in the tools you’ll actually use.

• Case studies and failure points from real projects — because in robotics, knowing what goes wrong is half the battle.

• Performance secrets: caching, optimization, and even real-time constraints that separate hobby demos from production-ready systems.

This is kinematics without the ivory tower. Everything is written for the professional who has to ship code, debug under pressure, and make robots perform reliably in the real world.

If you’re serious about robotics engineering, this is not optional reading. It’s the map, the compass, and the “watch your back” guide rolled into one.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798268326888
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 437