Geometrical Foundations of Robotics

This book is a collection of talks presented at the 1998 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Broadly, the meeting discussed the application of modern geometrical methods to problems in robotics. There are now a few textbooks in this area and more papers in the literature. The aim of this book is to introduce these ideas, their simplicity and power, to a wider audience.

The first three chapters give an introduction to the Lie group and Lie algebras. The focus is on the group of rigid body transformations in space, namely the Lie group which is fundamental to robotics. The following chapters provide an overview of some of the most up-to-date work in the field of geometrical methods in robotics and have been written by some of the leading researchers in the field. The applications addressed cover the design of robot kinematics, the analysis of singularities in robots and mechanisms, and a geometric view of some computational issues.