Modern Robotics: Mechanics, Planning, and Control

This introduction to robotics offers a distinct and unified perspective of the mechanics, planning and control of robots. Ideal for self-learning, or for courses, as it assumes only freshman-level physics, ordinary differential equations, linear algebra and a little bit of computing background. Modern Robotics presents the state-of-the-art, screw-theoretic techniques capturing the most salient physical features of a robot in an intuitive geometrical way. With numerous exercises at the end of each chapter, accompanying software written to reinforce the concepts in the book and video lectures aimed at changing the classroom experience, this is the go-to textbook for learning about this fascinating subject.

Kevin M. Lynch received his B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton, New Jersey in 1989, and Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania in 1996. He has been a faculty member at Northwestern University, Illinois since 1997 and has held visiting positions at California Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, Tsukuba University, Japan and Northeastern University in Shenyang, China. His research focuses on dynamics, motion planning and control for robot manipulation and locomotion; self-organizing multi-agent systems; and physically interacting human-robot systems. A Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), he also was the recipient of the IEEE Early Career Award in Robotics and Automation, Northwestern's Professorship of Teaching Excellence, and the Northwestern Teacher of the Year award in engineering. Currently he is Senior Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and the incoming Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. This is his third book.

Frank C. Park received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, and his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, Massachusetts in 1991. He has been on the faculty at University of California, Irvine and since 1995 he has been Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Seoul National University. His research interests are in robot mechanics, planning and control, vision and image processing, and related areas of applied mathematics. He has been an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Robotics and Automation Society Distinguished Lecturer and has held adjunct faculty positions at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York, the Interactive Computing Department at Georgia Institute of Technology and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Robotics Institute. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and developer of the EDX course Robot Mechanics and Control I, II.