ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1, a brief history of robotics was given and the laws of robotics were introduced. This was followed by an introduction to robotic surgery where the work of several researchers was discussed. The advantages of robotic surgical systems were expounded, and finally, different robots for several surgical procedures were introduced. In Chapter 2, the science of motion of robotic links, regardless of the forces that generate the motion, was introduced. This is commonly known as kinematics of multiaxes robotic structures. This knowledge was then applied to robotic manipulators and objects to be manipulated. First, the structure of a typical multilink or multiaxes robotic manipulator was described and some mathematical notations to be used were introduced. Second, we discussed the applications of 4 ¥ 4 and n ¥ 4 homogenous transformations in robotic kinematics. Subsequently, these transformations were used to describe the general position and orientation, that is, the kinematic attitude, of one robotic link with respect to an adjacent robotic link. Thus, the notion of Denavit-Hartenberg (D-H) homogenous transformations was introduced and pertinent equations were derived. Then the concepts of direct kinematics and inverse kinematics were introduced. Finally, the workspace of a robotic manipulator was defined and illustrated for 2D and 3D two-link robotic manipulators.
