Introduction to Autonomous Robots: Kinematics, Perception, Localization and Planning, 2nd Edition

This book introduces concepts in mobile, autonomous robotics to 3rd-4th year students in Computer Science or a related discipline. The book covers principles of robot motion, forward and inverse kinematics of robotic arms and simple wheeled platforms, perception, error propagation, localization and simultaneous localization and mapping. The cover picture shows a wind-up toy that is smart enough to not fall off a table just using intelligent mechanism design and illustrate the importance of the mechanism in designing intelligent, autonomous systems. This book is open source, open to contributions, and released under a creative common license.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Locomotion and Manipulation
Chapter 3. Forward and Inverse Kinematics
Chapter 4. Path Planning
Chapter 5. Sensors
Chapter 6. Vision
Chapter 7. Feature extraction
Chapter 8. Uncertainty and Error Propagation
Chapter 9. Localization
Chapter 10. Grasping
Chapter 11. Simultaneous Localization and Mapping
Chapter 12. RGB-D SLAM
Appendix A. Trigonometry
Appendix B. Linear Algebra
Appendix C. Statistics
Appendix D. How to write a research paper
Appendix E. Sample curricula