Use measurements, units, coordinate axes, angles, drawings, tolerances, and simple free-body ideas. These tools let you describe where things are, how big they are, and how they move before touching hardware.

Set up safe habits for hand tools, soldering, batteries, spinning parts, pinch points, and emergency stops. Practice building and testing in small steps so mistakes are visible before they become dangerous.

Follow robotics from early automata and industrial arms to mobile robots, surgical systems, drones, humanoids, and AI-powered machines. The chapter shows how sensors, computing, manufacturing, safety rules, and labor needs shaped today’s robots.

Handle voltage, current, resistance, power, grounding, switches, fuses, batteries, and motor loads. Wire simple circuits and read basic electrical diagrams without guessing.

Use microcontrollers, GPIO pins, PWM, ADCs, serial buses, relays, motor drivers, and power regulators. Build small circuits that let software read sensors and command hardware.

Write simple robot programs with variables, loops, functions, timing, state, and input/output. Move from scripts to code that reacts reliably to changing sensor readings.

Organize robot software into modules, messages, loops, interrupts, processes, and safety checks. Handle timing, concurrency, faults, logs, and configuration so behavior stays predictable.

Choose and use DC motors, servos, steppers, brushless motors, solenoids, pneumatics, hydraulics, gearboxes, belts, and lead screws. Match torque, speed, precision, weight, cost, and control needs to the job.

Design simple robot bodies with materials, fasteners, bearings, shafts, loads, friction, backlash, stiffness, and center of mass in mind. Sketch and prototype mechanisms that survive real movement.

Use encoders, limit switches, IMUs, cameras, depth sensors, LiDAR, force sensors, tactile sensors, microphones, GPS, and proximity sensors. Pick sensors based on range, accuracy, speed, cost, and the environment.

Turn raw sensor readings into useful values through filtering, calibration, synchronization, and error checks. Deal with noise, drift, latency, missing data, and bad mounting choices.

Use feedback to make motors and mechanisms reach a target instead of merely receiving commands. Tune proportional, integral, and derivative control while watching overshoot, steady-state error, and instability.

Estimate hidden robot states such as velocity, orientation, pose, and battery health from imperfect measurements. Use practical ideas behind complementary filters, Kalman filters, and sensor fusion.

Represent robot parts, tools, sensors, objects, and maps with coordinate frames and transforms. Move points and directions between frames so software and hardware agree on where things are.

Calculate how joint angles place a robot arm’s hand in space and how desired hand motion becomes joint motion. Use forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, Jacobians, singularities, and workspace limits.

Connect force, mass, inertia, acceleration, friction, and energy to robot motion. Use dynamics to predict loads, improve control, avoid damage, and choose motors with enough margin.

Model differential-drive, Ackermann, omnidirectional, and tracked robots. Control speed, turning, odometry, traction, slopes, and wheel slip in real indoor and outdoor settings.

Handle balance, gaits, contact forces, compliance, and uneven terrain for legged and underactuated robots. See why walking machines are harder than wheeled robots and how modern controllers keep them upright.

Design grippers, suction tools, fingers, wrists, fixtures, and tool changers for real tasks. Match end effectors to object shape, material, uncertainty, speed, hygiene, and safety requirements.

Plan motions that reach goals while avoiding obstacles, joint limits, collisions, and unsafe regions. Use configuration spaces, graph search, sampling methods, trajectory smoothing, and constraints.

Build maps while estimating where a robot is inside them. Use odometry, landmarks, scan matching, loop closure, occupancy grids, and SLAM failure checks.

Use cameras for calibration, feature detection, optical flow, depth, object detection, tracking, and pose estimation. Turn images into spatial information a robot can act on.

Apply neural networks to perception tasks such as detection, segmentation, depth, grasp prediction, and scene labeling. Cover datasets, annotation, training, evaluation, edge inference, and failure modes that matter on robots.

Create high-level robot behavior with state machines, behavior trees, task planners, and recovery actions. Make robots handle multi-step jobs, interruptions, and “try again” logic instead of only executing one command.

Build robot systems with nodes, messages, services, actions, parameters, transforms, and launch files in ROS 2. Use modern middleware patterns that support distributed robots, real-time needs, and multi-machine deployments.

Test robot ideas in physics simulators before risking hardware. Use simulation, digital twins, synthetic sensor data, domain randomization, and sim-to-real checks without pretending simulation is the real world.

Collect, label, replay, and analyze robot data from sensors, commands, logs, and failures. Use datasets to compare changes, train models, reproduce bugs, and make better engineering decisions.

Train robots from examples given by people through teleoperation, kinesthetic teaching, demonstrations, and learned policies. Handle covariate shift, safety limits, task variation, and evaluation on real hardware.

Use reinforcement learning for control and decision-making when trial, reward, and long-term outcome matter. Cover reward design, exploration, simulation training, safety constraints, and sim-to-real transfer.

Use large language models, vision-language models, and vision-language-action models to connect instructions, perception, planning, and action. Add grounding, tool use, retrieval, guardrails, and human approval so generated plans stay tied to the robot’s real abilities.

Design robots that share workspaces with people using speed and separation monitoring, power and force limiting, hand guiding, safety-rated sensors, and risk assessments. Apply collaborative robot practices without assuming “cobot” automatically means safe.

Create robot interactions through speech, screens, lights, gestures, haptics, and social cues. Design for trust, accessibility, consent, handoff, confusion recovery, and the limits of anthropomorphic behavior.

Protect robots from unsafe commands, network attacks, data leaks, spoofed sensors, and supply-chain risks. Secure updates, credentials, remote access, logs, and fail-safe behavior for connected machines.

Design fleets that coordinate work across many robots with scheduling, task allocation, traffic control, charging, maps, and remote monitoring. Use edge and cloud systems while planning for latency, outages, and on-site recovery.

Apply robotics to factories, warehouses, welding, painting, inspection, packaging, and assembly. Cover fixtures, cycle time, repeatability, safety cells, PLCs, quality checks, and integration with production lines.

Handle the special constraints of drones, marine robots, agricultural robots, mining robots, and disaster-response machines. Deal with weather, terrain, communications, endurance, localization, and field repair.

Work with surgical robots, rehabilitation devices, assistive robots, cleaning robots, delivery robots, and care settings. Cover reliability, hygiene, privacy, human supervision, clinical risk, and service workflows.

Use compliant materials, soft actuators, tendons, springs, variable stiffness, and bio-inspired structures. Design robots that are safer around people and better suited for delicate, irregular, or living environments.

Verify that a robot meets requirements through unit tests, hardware-in-the-loop tests, fault injection, acceptance tests, safety validation, and field trials. Track issues from lab discovery to root cause, fix, release, and follow-up.

Follow a realistic project from user need to requirements, concept sketches, prototype, controls, perception, safety review, testing, deployment, documentation, and maintenance. This ties mechanical, electrical, software, AI, and operations decisions into one workflow.

Navigate safety standards, product rules, workplace rules, privacy duties, liability, documentation, and incident reporting that affect robotics work. Cover common standards such as ISO 10218, ISO/TS 15066, IEC 61508, ISO 13849, and domain-specific rules where they apply.

Plan a path into robotics through roles such as technician, mechanical designer, embedded developer, controls engineer, perception engineer, integrator, field engineer, researcher, and product lead. Build proof-of-skill projects, portfolios, lab notes, certifications, and learning habits that keep pace with the field.