Bruno Siciliano is Professor of Control and Robotics at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy, President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and a Fellow of both IEEE and ASME. He is Co-Editor of the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics series, and the Springer Handbook of Robotics. His research interests include identification and adaptive control, impedance and force control, visual tracking and servoing, redundant and cooperative manipulators, lightweight flexible arms, space robots, human-centered and service robotics. He has co-authored 6 books, 6 edited volumes, and over 240 technical papers.

Lorenzo Sciavicco is Professor of Control and Robotics at the Third University of Rome in Italy. He has been one of the pioneers of robot control research. His research interests include automatic control theory and applications, manipulator inverse kinematics techniques, redundant manipulator control, force/motion control of manipulators, and cooperative robot manipulation. He has co-authored 3 books, 1 edited volume, and over 100 technical papers.

Luigi Villani is Associate Professor of Control and Robotics at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy. His research interests include identification and adaptive control, impedance and force control, visual tracking and servoing, redundant and cooperative manipulators,and service robotics. He has co-authored 2 books, 1 edited volume, and over 120 technical papers.

Giuseppe Oriolo is Associate Professor of Control and Robotics at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in Italy. He is an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics. His research interests include nonlinear control and robotics, visual servoing, redundant manipulators, mobile and nonholonomic robots, motion planning, sensor-based navigation and exploration, and service robotics. He has co-authored 2 books and over 120 technical papers.

This volume provides the basic know-how on the foundations of robotics: modeling, planning, and control. It uniquely blends and clearly develops fundamental and technological topics in twelve chapters, with a gradually increasing level of complexity. In addition, it presents a wide variety of relevant problems and introduces and explains, step-by-step, the proper tools to find engineering-oriented solutions. Fundamental coverage includes kinematics, statics and dynamics of manipulators, trajectory planning and motion control in free space. Technological aspects include actuators, sensors, hardware- and software-control architectures and industrial robot-control algorithms. More than 60 examples and case studies are carefully worked out and interwoven through the text, with frequent resort to simulation. In addition, more than 100 end-of-chapter exercises are proposed, and the book is accompanied by an online solutions manual containing the MATLAB code for computer problems.