[4 Credits] Masters and Doctorate Degree Programs of Unmanned Vehicle University. Register

Robotics is the engineering science and technology of robots that involve the design, manufacture, control, and programming of robots; the use of robots to solve problems; the study of the control processes, sensors, and algorithms used in humans, animals, and machine; and the application of these control processes and algorithms to the design of robots. Without assuming any prior knowledge of robotics, this 12-week ‘instructor led’ online course covers the foundations of robotics addressing two major sub-fields of robotics, namely, industrial robotics and mobile robotics. The first part of the course covers different topics related to industrial robotics such as robot morphology, kinematics, trajectory planning, motion control, and programming. The second part of the course focuses on mobile robotics providing a broad overview of the technologies and methods of mobile robotics such as locomotion systems, state estimation, localization, mapping, and motion planning. This is a lecture- self study-project course in which topics are taught by the instructor online using course management software and self-study activities and a course project are completed by students. Self-study activities of the course include study reports, literature survey paper and paper critics.

Course Objectives:
This course provides a comprehensive introduction to industrial robotics and mobile robotics and covers different related concepts, problems, tools and applications of robotics. After completing this course, the students will be able to:

1. Define a robot, robotics, industrial & mobile robots and robot components such as (manipulator or rover, end effectors, degrees of freedom, workspace, robot reference frames, pay-load, reach, accuracy, precision, repeatability, duty cycle).
2. Categorize various types of robots according to their tasks and purposes.
3. Determine how to represent the motions of a multi-DOF robot in space and how to derive the forward kinematic equations of different robot configurations such as Cartesian, cylindrical, and spherical coordinates.
4. Determine the position, velocity and acceleration of any joint at any time instant by using the 3rd or 5th order polynomial joint-space trajectory planning techniques and calculate the joint angles needed to make the robot move in a certain trajectory using the Cartesian-space method.
5. Show how to model a robot joint’s actuator, determine the motor response and its steady state value and apply the control laws to stabilize the joint’s position.
6. Classify various programming languages for robots according to their programming levels or classes.
7. Categorize various types of mobile robots according to their field of application and purpose.
8. Understand the challenging problems of mobile robots.
9. Classify various robot localization methods found in mobile robot applications.
10. Solve recursive state estimation problems used by mobile robot controllers to estimate the current state of the robot.
11. Classify various mapping techniques used in environment mapping for mobile robots.
12. Recognize different robot motion planning algorithms commonly used in mobile robot applications.

Course Instructor: Dr. Alaa Khamis
Email: alaa[dot]khamis[at]gmail[dot]com

Textbooks:
- Saeed Benjamin Niku. Introduction to Robotics: Analysis, Control, Applications. 2nd Edition, Wiley, 2010.
- B. Siciliano and O. Khatib. Springer Handbook of Robotics. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.
- R. Siegwart and I. Nourbakhsh. Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots. MIT Press, 20041.
- T. Braunl. Embedded Robotics. Springer, 2006.
Lectures will be based mainly, but not exclusively, on material in these textbooks and other resources. Lectures will not follow the same sequence as the material presented in the texts.