2: Locomotion and Manipulation

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Autonomous robots are systems that sense, actuate, compute, and communicate. Actuation, the focus of this chapter, is the ability of the robot to move and to manipulate the world. Specifically, we differentiate between locomotion as the ability of the robot to move and manipulation as the ability to move objects in the environment of the robot. Both activities are closely related: during locomotion the robot uses its motors to exert forces on its environment (ground, water or air) to move itself; during manipulation it uses motors to exert forces on objects to move them relative to the environment. This might not even require different motors. Insects are good examples for this: both can use their 6 legs not only for locomotion, but also for picking up and manipulating objects. The goals of this chapter are

introduce the concepts of locomotion, manipulation and their duality
explain static vs. dynamic stability
introduce “degrees-of-freedom”
and introduce forward kinematics of static arms.