Foundations of Robotics

Charles Fox is the Programme Leader of MSc Robotics and AI at the University of Lincoln, UK. The programme provides a unified approach linking traditional Computer Science and Engineering topics with modern AI. He served as the programme chair of the UK’s robotics and AI conference, TAROS, in 2021. Fox advises leading venture capital, investment bank, and private equity firms on AI strategy and implementation. He studied MA Computer Science at Cambridge, MSc Informatics at Edinburgh, and DPhil Information Engineering at Oxford. He has won teaching awards from students and universities and is the author of over 100 peer-reviewed publications and the book ‘Computer Architecture: from the stone age to the quantum Age’ with No Starch Press.Jonathan Aitken is Senior University Teacher in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Sheffield, UK. Previously as a Research Fellow he worked in the Autonomous Control Laboratory within the Autonomous Systems and Robotics Group of the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering. His research focuses on autonomous reconfiguration of robotic systems, especially on quadcopter platforms. Dr Aitken holds an MEng and PhD in Electronic Engineering, both awarded by the University of York. He has previously worked in the Computer Science Department at the University of York’s High Integrity Systems Engineering Group, working on safety in Systems-of-Systems.

• IntroductionPart I: Mechatronics - Building RobotsChapter 1. Building RobotsChapter 2. Programming RobotsChapter 3. Working with Space and Time Chapter 4. MechanicsChapter 5. ElectromagnetismChapter 6. SensorsPart II: Cybernetics - Controlling Robots Chapter 7. Controlling BehavioursChapter 8. Kinematics and Inverse Kinematics Chapter 9. Dynamics and Inverse Dynamics Chapter 10. Digital Control of Dynamics Trajectories Part III: Aritifical Intelligence (AI) - Automating Robots Chapter 11. Probabilistic AIChapter 12. Tracking, Localisation and Mapping Chapter 13. Planning Chapter 14. Neural Networks Chapter 15. Robot VisionChapter 16. Transformers and Foundation Models