Robot Mechanics
Lecture Notes — Jun.-Prof. Dr. Edoardo Milana
1 Course information
| Lecturer | Jun.-Prof. Dr. Edoardo Milana (Laboratory for Soft Machines, IMTEK) |
| Tutors | Xin Li, Johannes Frey |
| Semester | Sommersemester 2026 (Apr 20 – Jul 25, 2025) |
| Room | G.-Köhler-Allee 101, SR 00-017/19 |
| Course number | 11LE50V-5727 |
Schedule. Monday and Friday, 14:00–16:00, same room. There is no distinction between lecture and exercise sessions: each slot begins with 30–45 minutes of lecture followed by work on the weekly problem set.
Attendance is not mandatory but highly recommended.
Final exam: written, 120 minutes. Students who have solved the weekly problem sets throughout the course are very well prepared.
2 Course objectives
Understanding Robotic Architecture. By the end of the course, students should have a comprehensive understanding of how classical robots are built and what are their main components: mechanisms, sensors, actuators, and control architecture.
Robot Mechanical Analysis. Students will be able to analyse and model robotic manipulators using direct, inverse, and differential kinematics, concluding with the statics of a robotic manipulator.
3 Lecture notes
These notes develop the geometry and mechanics of robotic manipulators, from rigid-body pose to differential kinematics, statics, and actuator modelling. They follow the structure of the lecture course and are intended as a concise reference and complement to the lecture slides.
| Chapter | Topic |
|---|---|
| 1. Introduction | Scope, manipulator families, course roadmap |
| 2. Robot Components | Mobility (Grübler), actuators, gears, strain sensing |
| 3. Rigid Body Pose | Rotation matrices, Euler angles, quaternions, homogeneous transforms |
| 4. Direct and Inverse Kinematics | DH convention, worked examples, inverse kinematics |
| 5. Differential Kinematics and Statics | Jacobian, singularities, virtual work, statics |
4 References
Main textbook (selected chapters)
- Siciliano, Bruno et al. Foundations of Robotics. Springer, 2025.
Extra reading
- Tsai, Lung-Wen. Robot Analysis: The Mechanics of Serial and Parallel Manipulators. John Wiley & Sons, 1999.
- Lynch, Kevin M., and Frank C. Park. Modern Robotics. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Online resources