Robotics: Control, Sensing, Vision andIntelligence
Robotics: Control, Sensing, Vision & Intelligence
K.S. Fu, R.C. Gonzalez and C.S.G. LeeMcGraw-Hill1987672 pp.ISBN 0-07-100421-1£23.99
Suitable for both students and practising engineers or scientists, this book can be used as a textbook and a reference source. It covers the basic principles underlying the design,analysis and synthesis of robotics systems.
Eight of the ten chapters cover a range of topics found in other similar robotics books: an introduction to the background of robotics, robot arm kinematics and dynamics, planning of manipulator trajectories, control of manipulators, sensing, robot programming languages, and robot intelligence and task planning. Chapters 7 and 8 are dedicated to low- and high-level vision systems respectively, and give a more detailed discussion of vision systems, than normally found in a book which covers such a range of subject topics. Image acquisition, illumination techniques, imaging geometry, basic relationships between pixels, and pre-processing, are all discussed as low-level vision. High-level vision covers segmentation and description of images and three dimensional structures,recognition and interpretation. The appendices contain a review of basic vector and matrix algebra, and three methods for obtaining the jacobian for a six-link manipulator, with rotary or sliding joints.
The mathematics found within this book is clearly explained, with examples and figures being used to clarify the concepts being developed. Many graphical examples are used to clarify the text and to show the effects of different image processing techniques. Examples of mechanical manipulators and different link co-ordinate systems are appropriately associated to robots found in industry, and thus bring theory nicely into the real world. A rather vivid mistake can be found in Figure 7.5, where in a comparison of images, one of them has been rotated by 180 degrees.
Overall, this is a very useful reference book, with an easy to understand explanation of the topics covered, clear diagrams and figures, with useful examples of image processing techniques.
