Customer Reviews

Mechanics of Robotic Manipulation (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents)

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This is a beautiful introduction to the field of robotic manipulation, and should be required reading for all graduate students in robotics. Each topic is treated carefully and rigorously. It is only fair to admit that the author was my Ph.D. advisor.

There is a strong emphasis on providing a mental toolkit for reasoning about physical systems. A particular highlight is the selection of graphical methods for thinking about rigid body systems with friction and contact. The careful reader, after working through this book, will be able to reason about mechanical systems with pencil and paper, rather than blind implementations of computer simulations.

The book is dense and requires significant work from the reader. Though there are no prerequisites for the book other than basic calculus, many of the proofs and techniques require some mathematical sophistication and a strong attention to detail to follow.

The book is also specialized, and does not attempt to cover all the details of manipulator design, modeling, or control -- instead, the focus is on the motion of the system being manipulated, which might be much more interesting than the manipulator itself.

For the above reasons, this book is not for everyone, but as a robotics researcher, I have come back to this book over and over again while reviewing papers or thinking about how to quickly model and understand a new system.

Mason covers quite a collection of techniques in his book; so as an partial overview of work done on techniques addressing problems of mechanical nature in robotics, this book is reasonable. One can use it as a starting point to find more information on these topics.

However, in my opinion the book is not suitable to gain an understanding of the subject. Mason tries to cover many methods but often fails to clearly describe the essence of techniques. I often find myself reading the same section a number of times to piece together the essence of how a technique works.