Robotics: Basics and Selected Advanced Concepts

This course starts with an introduction to robotics, the key elements and constituents of a robot and science and technology in robots. It provides a unified treatment for the modelling and analysis of serial, parallel, and hybrid manipulators using the key concept of Denavit-Hartenberg parameters, solution of the direct and inverse kinematics of serial and parallel robots and the associated concepts of workspace and mobility are presented. The concept of velocity of the links of the robots and the Jacobian matrix is developed and the associated concepts of singularities in robots are discussed in depth. The equations of motion are derived using the Lagrangian formulation and their solutions using numerical methods are presented. To fully understand control of robots, basic concepts in linear control is introduced using the example of control of a single link of a robot and then the more advanced concept of model-based control is discussed. The course also introduces advanced topics in robotics such as modelling and analysis of wheeled mobile robots, deployable structures and cable driven and pneumatically actuated small/micro robots. The course draws upon a great deal on experiments and hardware developed by research students at IISc and software simulations and hardware experiments are suggested for the course students to do on their own to complement the material taught in the course.INTENDED AUDIENCE :Primarily Master’s and Ph D students in mechanical, electrical and computer science disciplines. UG students taking Robotics as an elective.PREREQUISITES : UG level mathematics and programming knowledgeINDUSTRIES SUPPORT :Ashok Leyland, Chennai, GE and GM, TAL and Tata Motors, Government organizations such as ISAC-ISRO (Bangalore), BARC (Mumbai) and CAIR-DRDO (Bangalore)

Week 1:Introduction, Elements of a robotWeek 2:Mathematical preliminaries, D-H convention, ExamplesWeek 3:Direct and Inverse kinematics of serial robots, Workspace, Analytical and numerical solutionsWeek 4:Parallel robots – direct and inverse kinematics, Mobility, Stewart-Gough platform
Week 5:Applications of parallel robots in sun tracking, vibration isolationWeek 6:Velocity analysis, Singularities in serial and parallel robots, StaticsWeek 7:Redundancy and resolution of redundancy in robotsWeek 8:Dynamic equations of motion, derivation & simulation using Matlab
Week 9:Motion planning, Introduction to linear control, simulations & experiments Week 10:Nonlinear position and force control of robots, SimulationsWeek 11:Wheeled mobile robots, modeling and simulationsWeek 12:Over-constrained and deployable structures, Cable driven & pneumatically actuated flexible robots