Fundamentals of Robotics Base Lessons Archives

12 Feb 2021

Task Space and Workspace for Robots

Base Lessons, Fundamentals of Robotics 👉🏻

In this post, you will learn about the task space and workspace for robots and understand their difference with the robot's C-space. You can find a comprehensive post about the C-space of the robot HERE. ⚠️ This post also has a video version that complements the reading. Our suggestion is to watch the video and then read the reading for a deeper understanding. We saw before that the robot's C-space is the space of all possible configurations of a robot. But what does task space and workspace mean for robots? If you want to learn about task space and workspace,…

27 Jan 2021

Holonomic vs. Nonholonomic Constraints for Robots

Base Lessons, Fundamentals of Robotics 👉🏻

In this post, you will learn that holonomic or configuration constraints reduce the degrees of freedom (dofs) of a robot, whereas nonholonomic constraints reduce the space of possible velocities. ⚠️ This post also has a video version that complements the reading. Our suggestion is to watch the video and then read the reading for a deeper understanding. Holonomic (Configuration) Constraints for Robots Let’s see this with an example. Remember our famous 4-bar linkage with one degree of freedom? If you do not, please refer to this lesson. For now, consider a 4-bar linkage that has 4 links (ground is a…

08 Jan 2021

Everything About the Degrees of Freedom of a Robot

Base Lessons, Fundamentals of Robotics 👉🏻

In this post, you will learn ANYTHING that you've ever needed to know about the degrees of freedom of a robot. You will become familiarized with a general formula to find the degrees of freedom of any mechanism, not just robotic arms. The degrees of freedom of a robot is the dimension of the robot's C-space, which is the minimum number of real numbers needed to represent the robot's configuration. As we saw in the previous post, the robot's configuration is our answer to the question where is the robot? And we also saw different ways to represent the configuration…

19 Dec 2020

Configuration and Configuration Space (Topology and Representation) of a Robot

Base Lessons, Fundamentals of Robotics 👉🏻

This is the second lesson on Fundamentals of Robotics, and it will be your guide to know everything you have ever needed to know about the configuration and configuration space (its topology and representation) of a robot. In this lesson, we will talk about the configuration of the robot. Then, the configuration space and topology of the configuration space will be discussed, and finally, we will talk about different ways to represent the configuration space. What is the Configuration of Something? The configuration of something answers the question, where is that thing? For example, to know where a door is,…

08 Dec 2020

Fundamentals of Robotics: Introduction

Base Lessons, Fundamentals of Robotics 👉🏻

This is the first post of the series of Fundamentals of Robotics course that provides an introduction to the course and some introductory remarks on Robotics. The course will cover all the fundamentals of robotics, including kinematics, mechanics, planning, and control. This course is needed because, in most robotics classes, only part of the fundamentals are covered, and advanced topics such as planning and control are usually neglected. To learn robotics efficiently, all of these topics should be covered in tandem, and neglecting each part will hinder learning. We will use free robot simulators to implement most of the methods…