Robotics

[nebu]

I am absolutely new to the world of robotics.... could you suggest some books which will point me in the right direction.....

[Yossarian]

I took an introductory course in robotics for mechanical engineering students. We used the textbook "Introduction to Robotics: Mechanics and Control" Third Edition by John J. Craig; you should be able to find it at a university library. It was helpful, but brief, and covered topics like spacial transforms, manipulator forward and inverse kinematics and dynamics, and control systems. The book has instructions on how to download a Matlab Robotics toolbox, which I used but did not find all that useful for my robot design project. I did write a few Matlab program of my own, though.

If you want a good novel, however, I would recommend "The Caves of Steel" by Isaac Asimov or "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. ****.

Hope that helps.
-Y