Overview of robotics – manipulators and field robots; robot mechanisms - serial chains, re- gional and orientational mechanisms, parallel chains, reachable and dexterous work space, mechanisms of wheeled and walking robots; spatial displacements, rotation matrices, Euler an- gles, homogenous transformation, D-H parameters, forward and inverse problems for serial and parallel manipulators; task planning – joint space and task space planning; sensors – joint dis- placement sensors, force sensors, range finders, vision sensors; actuators - electric motors - stepper, PMDC and brushless DC motors, pneumatic and hydraulic actuators; speed reducers; Servo control of manipulators - joint feedback control, effect of nonlinearities, inverse dynamic control, force feedback control; higher level control – path planning, configuration space, road map methods, graph search algorithms, potential field method.

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