Autonomous robots are systems that sense, compute, communicate, and actuate. Actuation, the focus of this chapter, is the ability of the robot to move and to manipulate the world. Specifically, we differentiate between locomotion as the robot’s ability to move itself and manipulation as the robot’s ability to move objects in the environment. Both activities are closely related: during locomotion the robot uses its motors to exert forces on its environment (ground, water, or air) to move itself; during manipulation it uses motors to exert forces on objects to move them relative to the rest of the environment. This might not even require different motors. Insects are good examples for this: they can use their six legs not only for locomotion, but also for picking up and manipulating objects.
- 2.1 defines kinematics, dynamics, locomotion and manipulation
- 2.2 defines static vs dynamic stability and motivates why we care about robots that can do both
- 2.3 defines degrees of freedom
- 2.4 defines frames of reference and includes some of the math involved in using frames of reference effectively.