The first book of the new, textbook series, entitled Applied Dynamics of
Manipulation Robots: Modelling, Analysis and Examples, by M.
Vukobratovic, published by Springer-Verlag (1989) was devoted to the
problems of dynamic models and dynamic analysis of robots. The present
book, the second in the series, is concerned with the problems of the
robot control. In conceiving this textbook, several dillemas arouse. The
main issue was the question on what should be incorporated in a textbook
on such a complex subject. Namely, the robot control comprises a wide
range of topics related to various aspects of robotics, starting from
the syn- thesis of the lowest, executive, control level, through the
synthesis of trajectories (which is mainly related to kinematic models
of robots) and various algorithms for solving the problem of task and
robot moti- on planning (including the solving of the problems by the
methods of artificial intelligence) to the aspects of processing the
data obtai- ned from sensors. The robot control is closely related to
the robot pro- gramming (i. e. the development of highly-specialized
programming lan- guages for robot programming). Besides, numerous
aspects of the con- trol realization should be included here. It is
obvious that all these aspects of control cannot be treated in detail in
the frame of a text- book.