This lecture covers the Forward Kinematics Model for robot manipulators, and its role in calculating end-effector poses for given joint coordinates. This will extend to a presentation of the Jacobian matrix for mapping joint velocities to end-effector velocities. This is an important tool necessary for the dynamic model derivation. Topics include transformation combination, the geometric and analytic Jacobian, singularities and how to detect them, and the relationship between the Jacobian and workspace dexterity.

Building on the linear algebra prerequisites from the reading material, students will leave this session with the tools needed to reason about how a robot moves in space and why certain configurations are problematic.