Preface

The practice of robotics and computer vision each involve the application of computational algorithms to data. The research community has developed a very large body of algorithms but for a newcomer to the field this can be quite daunting. Open-source Toolboxes, one for robotics and one for vision, provide Python implementations of many important algorithms that empower users to work with real problems, not just trivial examples.

This new book makes the fundamental algorithms of robotics, vision and control accessible to all. It weaves together theory, algorithms and examples in a narrative that covers robotics and computer vision separately and together. Using the latest versions of the Toolboxes the author shows how complex problems can be decomposed and solved using just a few simple lines of code. The topics covered are guided by real problems observed by the author over many years as a practitioner of both robotics and computer vision. It is written in a light but informative style, it is easy to read and absorb, and includes over 1600 Python examples and figures. The book is a real walk through the fundamentals of mobile robots, navigation, localization, arm-robot kinematics, dynamics and joint level control, then camera models, image processing, feature extraction and multi-view geometry, and finally bringing it all together with an extensive discussion of visual servo systems.

The first two editions of this book were based on MATLAB® in conjunction with open-source toolboxes that are now thirty years old – that’s a long time for any piece of software. Much has happened in the last decade that motivates a change to the software foundations of the book, and that has led to two third editions:

• The version you are reading, is based on Python which is a popular open-source language with massive third party support. The old MATLAB Toolboxes have been redesigned and reimplemented in Python, taking advantage of popular open-source packages and resources to provide platform portability, fast browser-based 3D graphics, online documentation, fast numerical and symbolic operations, shareable and web-browseable notebooks all powered by GitHub and the open-source community (Corke 2021).

• The alternative version, rewritten with colleagues Witold Jachimczyk and Remo Pillat from MathWorks®, is based on MATLAB, and state-of-the-art toolboxes developed, licensed, and supported by MathWorks.