Customer Reviews

Robotics

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book was published in 2007 and the back cover says it is "up-to-date" but the material is very old. For example, the very first chapter talks about the M2 robot at the MIT Leglab "currently being developed" but the M2 web site has not been updated since 2001.

Chapter 3 discusses basic electronics but uses the 8051 as an example of a microcontroller. This chip must be at least 10 years old and is nowhere near state of the art. The chapter runs to almost 90 pages out of 340, more than a quarter of the book, and is more than the three chapters on kinematics combined (4, 5 and 7).

The figures do not have captions in most cases and are not referenced in the text. All the figures are supposed to be on the CD, but most of them are missing and many of the ones that are there do not appear in the book.

There are no citations at all, so it is very difficult to tell how current some of the references are.

The CD-ROM does not contain all of the items mentioned in the book, such as the Turtle program. An entire appendix is devoted to a listing of this program, which is dated 2004 in the text, and is written in Turbo C for DOS! In fact, there are several locations in the book where there is a CD-ROM icon, but no corresponding code on the CD.

The Matlab code on the CD ranges in age from 2003 to 2007. Other programs on the CD to demonstrate kinematics are DOS programs from 1996!

I cannot believe that anyone could publish such a poorly edited collection of outdated material. I bought this book based on two 5-star ratings. In my opinion it is only worth 1 star, and that is for the coverage of basic mechanics and kinematics which never go out of date.

ROBOTICS is a top pick for college-level collections strong in engineering applications and industrial engineering based on robotic technology, and will appeal to both students and practicing engineering techs working in the field. The major robot classifications are surveyed, with chapters covering basic concepts, mechanics and electronics alike, and kinematics. The technical depth of the survey makes it a highly recommended pick for any college-level holding with courses on the topic.

This book is very thorough with the content. It is very easy to understand and very informative