Book Review: Robot Technology — Theory, Design and Applications

Robot Technology theory. design and applications: A. C. McDONALD (Prentice Hall, 1986,382 pp., £35.25) Robot technology brings together a large number of component technologies: mechanics, electrical drives, hydraulics, pneumatics, control, optics and many others. Any single book giving an adequate treatment of each would be impossibly large. The author has chosen to give a superficial coverage of a few aspects of each field appropriate to robot technology. Consequently the reader with specialist knowledge of one or two of the fields covered will find this book disappointing in those areas. Nevertheless the book is valuable for its wide scope. In my own specialist field of electrical machines, the account is at best superficial and at worst misleading. Nevertheless, I found the rest of the book interesting, informative and written with an easy style which makes the book a pleasure to read. It is not clear just which type of reader the book has been written for. Problems are presented at the end of each chapter but the price and style make the book unsuitable for use as a student text. Also the mixture of metric and other units is inappropriate in a text book. Practising engineers are probably familiar with most of the material at the level at which it is presented, yet the treatment is too detailed for a popular work. Perhaps the group who may gain most from this book are those practising engineers wishing to gain an appreciation of what robotics is all about. Basic principles are presented first with a review of robot types, drive types and the basics of mechanics, electrics and electronics. The treatment is not rigorous and much of it is unlikely to be necessary for most readers. There follows the main part dealing with robot motions coordinate systems, dynamics, control systems and drives. The various types of grippers or tools are dealt with in a single chapter and the text ends with a chapter on computer control. A number of useful appendices are included which give: unit conversions, Laplace transforms, data on CCD image sensors and list current U.S. robot manufacturing companies. A major omission for a work of this type is a bibliography giving works where a more thorough treatment of the many topics could be found. On the whole I found this book enjoyable to read but I feel that the material lacks the depth and rigour normally associated with books in its price range. E. SPOONER, Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics, UMIST