Robotics: Kinematics and Mathematical Foundations

Welcome to the first course in the Robotics MicroMasters series. This is an advanced course designed for learners who have a bachelor's degree in engineering or a similar field.

Learners will succeed in this course if they have familiarity with basic operations on matrices and vectors, as well as exposure to derivatives and partial derivatives.

The fundamental challenge this course addresses is how one can create robots that operate well in the real world.

• How to describe, analyze and think critically about fundamental problems in robotics, such as how to change the position or configuration of a robot
• The role of mathematics in describing robotic arms, mobile robots and other robotic platforms
• How to use the industry standard programming environment, MATLAB

Math Fundamentals

Week 1: Vector spaces, inner products, vector norms, orthogonality

Week 2: Linear transformations, matrix multiplication, matrix groups

Week 3: Coordinate transformations, rigid transformations, rotation matrices quaternions, Matrix groups SE(2) and SE(3)

Week 4: Project

Robot Kinematics

Week 5: Kinematic chains, forward kinematics,

Week 6: Inverse kinematics

Week 7: Parallel mechanisms

Week 8: Project

_ Kinematic Path Planning _

Week 9: Graph based methods, Dijkstra’s method, A*Star

Week 10: RRT, configuration space

Week 11: Artificial potential fields

Week 12: Project