ME 3460: Robot Dynamics and Control

Semesters: Spring 2025, Fall 2025

This course aims to provide students with the fundamentals of modeling and control of robotic manipulators. The first part of the course covers manipulator kinematics, beginning with a review of essential linear algebra topics. We then introduce coordinate frames, rigid body motion, and homogeneous transformations. This is followed by the Denavit-Hartenberg representation, forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, and Jacobians. In the second part of the course, we will first discuss the basics of dynamic modeling that relate the forces/torques applied to a robotic manipulator to the resulting motion. We will then talk about trajectory generation, where the goal is to construct a desirable trajectory for the manipulator between a given pair of initial and final poses. Finally, the course concludes with a review of linear dynamical systems and some control techniques for manipulators.

ME 5250: Robot Mechanics and Control

Semesters: Fall 2023, Fall 2024

This course aims to provide students with a solid foundation in the modeling and control of robotic manipulators. The first part of the course covers manipulator kinematics, beginning with a review of essential linear algebra topics. We then introduce coordinate frames, rotations, and homogeneous transformations. This is followed by the Denavit-Hartenberg representation, forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, and velocity kinematics. The second part of the course focuses primarily on the dynamics and control of manipulators. We start by deriving dynamic models that relate the forces and moments applied to a robot with its resulting motion. This is followed by a discussion on trajectory generation. Finally, the course concludes with a review of linear systems and the linear and nonlinear control techniques for manipulators.

EE 8950: Introduction to Controls and Signals for Robotics

Semesters: Fall 2020, Fall 2021 (UMN)

This course aims to provide students with the foundations of mathematical modeling, analysis, and control of dynamical systems with applications to robotics. The course starts with a review of the related mathematical preliminaries (linear algebra and differential equations) and the fundamentals of mathematical modeling based on first principles with examples from electrical, mechanical, and robotic systems (e.g., articulated robots, mobile robots). We then continue with linearization, the fundamental properties of linear time-invariant (LTI) systems, the representations of LTI systems using transfer functions and state space, and the analysis of such systems in time and frequency domains. The course ends with an introduction to feedback control and the PID controller.