Modern Robotics
This is the home page of the textbook "Modern Robotics: Mechanics, Planning, and Control," by Kevin M. Lynch and Frank C. Park. This page is under construction.
Book
This book is the result of course notes developed over many years for the course M2794.0027 Introduction to Robotics at Seoul National University and ME 449 Robotic Manipulation at Northwestern University. The course notes have been posted on the internet for years to support these classes. The date of the current compilation of the book is noted on the front page.
The current version should be considered a "beta" version. A final update will come before the end of November, 2016.
Since most of our students read on their tablets or laptops, the book pdf has been sized for easy reading on a tablet. We also provide other versions, obtained by appropriate cropping the default pdf file with Acrobat or by 2-up printing. The files have been compressed to about 6 MB; let us know if you have any problems reading them.
- Default 8.5x11 or A4 version. 10 pt font. With working hyperlinks and large margins.
- 4x3 aspect ratio tablet version. Formatted for 10 pt equivalent font on 4x3 aspect ratio 9.7" tablets. With working hyperlinks.
- 16x9 aspect ratio tablet version. The pages are sized for 4x3 aspect ratio, but if you have a giant 16x9 smartphone and good eyes, you might prefer this version. It uses the entire width of a 16x9 screen, with wasted space at top and bottom, to make the font as large as possible. With working hyperlinks.
- Large font 8.5x11 or A4 version. Approximately 12 pt font for eyes that need it. The hyperlinks are broken.
- 2 book pages per page, for printing and good eyes. Approximately 8.5 pt font equivalent. The hyperlinks are broken.
To navigate the book using the hyperlinks, click on the hyperlink. To go back where you came from, choose the button or keystroke appropriate to your pdf reader. For example, on the Mac with Acrobat or Acrobat Reader, use cmd-left arrow. With Preview on the Mac, use cmd-[. Some readers on other operating systems use alt-left arrow. You can google to see which solution works for your pdf reader.
Please click here to report any corrections for the book.
Software
Download the book software from GitHub.
The software accompanying the book is written in Mathematica, MATLAB, and Python. It is written to be educational and to reinforce the concepts in the book, not to be as computationally efficient or robust as possible.
The origin of the software is student solutions to homework exercises. In September 2016, Northwestern MS student Mikhail Todes produced the first version of the software for distribution. The software will be updated as bugs are discovered and fixed. As of October 2016, the software distribution should be considered a beta version.
To report any issues with the software, please click the "Issues" tab in GitHub.
You might also be interested in Peter Corke's excellent Robotics Toolbox for MATLAB and other robotics software linked to from his site.
Videos
Welcome to Modern Robotics! (2:00)
Sometime early in 2017, more videos supporting the book will be posted to YouTube and linked to from this wiki. The videos will be made with Northwestern's Lightboard. If you are interested to learn more about what these videos might look like, you can check out the mechatronics videos at http://nu32.org.
You can see an excellent collection of robotics videos at the Springer Handbook of Robotics Multimedia Extension.
Errata
If you have corrections to report for either the book or the software, please submit them using the links above under Book and Software.
Supplemental Information
- The UR5 URDF file from Chapter 4 of the book (.pdf format or .txt format). For learning purposes only, not actual use; it contains only kinematic and inertial properties. This file is based on the UR5 URDF from the ROS-Industrial team.
- Open-source software for time-optimal time scaling (Chapter 9.4), courtesy of Quang-Cuong Pham.
About the Authors
Kevin M. Lynch is Professor and Chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Northwestern University. He is a member of the Neuroscience and Robotics Lab and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. His research focuses on dynamics, motion planning, and control for robot manipulation and locomotion; self-organizing multi-agent systems; and physically interacting human-robot systems.
He is a Senior Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, former Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, and incoming Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. He is a co-author of The Principles of Robot Motion (MIT Press, 2005) and Embedded Computing and Mechatronics with the PIC32 Microcontroller (Elsevier, 2015), an IEEE fellow, and the recipient of the IEEE Early Career Award in Robotics and Automation, Northwestern's Professorship of Teaching Excellence, and the Northwestern Teacher of the Year award in engineering. He earned a BSE in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University and a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.
Frank C. Park received his BS in electrical engineering from MIT and his PhD in applied mathematics from Harvard University. From 1991 to 1995 he was assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Irvine. Since 1995 he has been professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Seoul National University. His research interests are in robot mechanics, planning and control, vision and image processing, and related areas of applied mathematics. He has been an IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Distinguished Lecturer, and received best paper awards for his work on visual tracking and parallel robot design. He has served on the editorial boards of the Springer Handbook of Robotics, Springer Advanced Tracts in Robotics (STAR), Robotica, and the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics. He has held adjunct faculty positions at the NYU Courant Institute and the Interactive Computing Department at Georgia Tech. He is a fellow of the IEEE, current editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and developer of the edX course Robot Mechanics and Control I, II.
Why LynchAndPark.org?
You may have gotten here from the link LynchAndPark.org. If you're like us, you forget the name of the textbook, but remember the names of the authors. We thought it would be easiest to remember this URL. If you ever have any problems with http://LynchAndPark.org, you can try http://www.LynchAndPark.org , http://ModernRobotics.org, or http://www.ModernRobotics.org.
