The notes here were taken when I was studying the MOOC, Modern Robotics, on the Coursera platform. The course was produced by Northwestern University, and in addition to the information on Coursera, you can also find relevant information on the course wiki written by Northwestern University. There, one could download the corresponding textbook and exercise book for free.

Because this course is such well-made and the content is extensive and yet reaching a satisfactory depth, so I decided to share my course notes, in which, on the one hand, it is convenient for me to review it in the future; and on the other hand, I hope this note (especially the “exercise attempt” part) would come in handy for cloud-classmates.

In fact, there are already a lot of notes about this course available on github, such as Muchen Sun’s Course Notes (this web page is just a poor imitation to that of Muchen Sun’s) to name a few, that exceedingly briefly but also meticulously summarize the theoretical knowledge of this course. I basically used these tremendously helpful notes when I was studying the course. My notes are mainly about exercises in the textbook. These questions are all very conducive to the understanding of the material, but unfortunately the answers to these questions have not been released. Therefore, please be critical about my attempts! It is worth mentioning that, in line with the Cousera Honor Code Term 3, it is not allowed to share any notes directly related to the Coursera quizzes and assignments, thus the notes will not cover the aforesaid materials (but there will be some ‘general’ discussion).

The kinematics theory favored by the Modern Robotics course is Product-of-Exponentials (PoE). There is an alternative kenematic theory called Denavit-Hartenburg Method (D-H method), which does not gain much attention in this course. If you are interested, there is a free online course called RoboGrok which addresses the D-H method in more detail.

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