Kinematics Mechanisms

This book contains papers on a wide range of topics in the area of kinematics, mechanisms, robotics, and design, addressing new research advances and innovations in design education. The content is divided into five main categories headed ‘Historical Perspectives’, ‘Kinematics and Mechanisms’, ‘Robotic Systems’, ‘Legged Locomotion’, and ‘Design Engineering Education’. Contributions take the form of survey articles, historical perspectives, commentaries on trends on education or research, original research contributions, and papers on design education.

This book provides the reader with an updated look at the current trends in kinematics methods and applications.

21st Century Kinematics focuses on algebraic problems in the analysis and synthesis of mechanisms and robots, compliant mechanisms, cable-driven systems and protein kinematics. The specialist contributors provide the background for a series of presentations at the 2012 NSF Workshop. The text shows how the analysis and design of innovative mechanical systems yield increasingly complex systems of polynomials, characteristic of those systems. In doing so, it takes advantage of increasingly sophisticated computational tools developed for numerical algebraic geometry and demonstrates the now routine derivation of polynomial systems dwarfing the landmark problems of even the recent past.

This book presents the most recent research advances in the theory, design, control and application of robot systems, which are intended for a variety of purposes such as manipulation, manufacturing, automation, surgery, locomotion and biomechanics. The issues addressed are fundamentally kinematic in nature, including synthesis, calibration, redundancy, force control, dexterity, inverse and forward kinematics, kinematic singularities, as well as over-constrained systems. Methods used include line geometry, quaternion algebra, screw algebra and linear algebra. These methods are applied to both parallel and serial multi-degree-of-freedom systems.

Modern technical advancements in areas such as robotics, multi-body systems, spacecraft, control, and design of complex mechanical devices and mechanisms in industry require the knowledge to solve advanced concepts in dynamics. “Mechanisms and Robots Analysis with MATLAB” provides a thorough, rigorous presentation of kinematics and dynamics. The book uses MATLAB as a tool to solve problems from the field of mechanisms and robots. The book discusses the tools for formulating the mathematical equations, and also the methods of solving them using a modern computing tool like MATLAB. An emphasis is placed on basic concepts, derivations, and interpretations of the general principles. The book is of great benefit to senior undergraduate and graduate students interested in the classical principles of mechanisms and robotics systems. Each chapter introduction is followed by a careful step-by-step presentation, and sample problems are provided at the end of every chapter.