Massimo Callegari

Citation

(2009), "Massimo Callegari", Industrial Robot, Vol. 36 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2009.04936fae.001

Massimo Callegari

Article Type: Web sites, patent abstracts and book review From: Industrial Robot: An International Journal, Volume 36, Issue 6

Advances in Robot Kinematics: Analysis and DesignEdited by Jadran Lenarcic and Philippe WengerSpringer2008$189472 pp.ISBN: 978-1-4020-8599-4www.springer.com/engineering/robotics/book/978-1-4020-8599-4,

The kinematics of mechanisms, besides being a fundamental issue in machine design, is still an ever green research topic; in fact, even if, since Franz Reuleaux studies to present day, many important contributions have been worked out in this subject, new ideas and breakthrough discoveries are continuously unveiled by kinematics researchers all over the world, especially in cutting-edge application fields such as robotics and biomechanics.

This is why the reader will be probably interested in this ninth book of the Advances in Robot Kinematics series, which collects the research results that have been discussed during the 11th ARK international symposium that was held in Batz-sur-Mer in June 2008.

The alert reader will note that this last volume is more focused on the potential applications of robot kinematics with respect to previous books; therefore, along with the traditional subjects of the symposium such as analysis and synthesis, direct and inverse kinematics, parallel kinematics machines, kinematics singularities and so on, special attention is now paid to the performances and properties of mechanisms, to the measurement of spatial poses and to robot calibration. Of course, the chapter on the design of robots and mechanisms still has a key role in the book, with the presentation of results on a wide set of different application areas, e.g. cable-driven robots, part orienting devices, unmanned aerial vehicles, surgical robots, etc.

For the analysis and synthesis of spatial kinematic chains, all the most powerful mathematical tools presently available to the researcher have been used by the contributing authors, including screw theory, Lie brackets, Grassmann-Cayley algebra, Assur groups, and quaternion algebra, and an entire chapter of the book is dedicated to such subjects.

The book is of high quality and collects the contributions of the most relevant scientists of the world in robot kinematics: the solid background in kinematics that is needed for the typical reader can be both considered as the proof of rigorous and outstanding scientific quality, and the only weak point of this excellent work by Lenarcic and Wenger. Anyway, the relevance of the treated topics suggests that it should reveal very useful for researchers, teachers and PhD students in robotics and machine mechanics, especially for those interested in design and control issues.