Mechanics and control of robots: Krishna C. Gupta; Springer, New York, Inc., 1997, ISBN: 0-387-94923-2

Robot control has provided fodder for control theorists, practitioners and educators for decades. Numerous textbooks have been written to teach the basic tools. Most introductory material assumes that a robot may be modeled as a set of rigid links, interconnected by simple revolute and prismatic joints whose actuators allow the control system to command desired torques. These and other simpli"cations ignore many real-world phenomena such as `stiction,a actuator dynamics, #exible cabling and linkages, backlash in gearing, and #uid mechanics present in hydraulic systems, but the mathematical models that result are well understood and surprisingly e!ective for deriving practical control strategies. Mechanics and Control of Robots by Krishna C. Gupta takes this approach, but despite the title, it does not cover robot control in any depth. In the short text (178 pages), only a 10 page subsection of the last chapter addresses robot control. The text is designed to introduce "rst year graduate students in mechanical engineering to kinematics (the study of robot motion), di!erential kinematics (mappings between joint and end-e!ector velocities and between forces and torques) and some dynamics and control. This is an ambitious agenda for such a short text, explaining the small amount of attention to control. A more appropriate title would be `Introduction to Robot Mechanics.a