This module covers a broad range of the necessary enabling and advanced technologies required for the design, integration and operation of Modern Robots including industrial robotic arms and mobile robots.

Design of Modern Robotic Systems. Component specification; Robot Arms, sensors and actuators. Position Control; Rigid Transformations, Kinematics, Inverse Kinematics. Robot Programming, Sensor System Integration, Robot Grippers. Positioning And Navigation, Position Estimation, Trajectory Following. Advanced topics: Robot arms: Payload analysis, Jacobians, Quaternions, Dynamics. Robot navigation: Explicit incorporation of uncertainty in Robotic Systems design, parametric approaches stochastic models of uncertainty, Kalman Filter design, specification and implementation.

On successful completion of this module, students will be able to: 1. Understand, explain and solve problems in robotics using the concepts of robot coordinate systems, direct and inverse kinematics. 2. Select/specify and analyse the detailed specification requirements of an industrial robot arm for a given automation task. 3. State, explain and demonstrate the use of a wide variety of general robot programming language (e.g. Val, V2) features. 4. Write and test robot programs for 6 degree of freedom industrial robot arms for a range of tasks. 5. Design, develop and test more complex robot programmes with sensory input from the environment, integrating user/operator command input and incorporating robot programme adaptability to real-world input. 6. Specify and describe detailed robot features as required for a range of robot assembly tasks. 7. Solve problems in mobile robot navigation incorporating techniques to deal with uncertainty (e.g. in sensor input). 8. Illustrate how approaches such as the use of Kalman filters can deal with navigational uncertainty.

not applicable to lab based module

not applicable to lab based module

Two hours lectures per week. Laboratory sessions - where students follow a structured set of laboratory sessions which include PC based experiment work, robot modelling, simulation and robot programming. Programming and execution of robot programms on 6 axis servo controlled industrial robots to be carried out in the robotics lab (C0045) robot cell. The lab is supported by a technician and teaching assistants. Lectures, labs tutorials and experiments are integrated to provide a comprehensive treatment of this technical lab-based subject.