An 18-section interactive reference covering the core knowledge every robotics and automation engineer needs. Includes robot kinematics (DH parameters, forward/inverse kinematics, singularities) across articulated, SCARA, Delta, and Cartesian architectures; ROS/ROS2 fundamentals and the Nav2/MoveIt/SLAM stack; machine vision cameras, lighting, and inspection tasks; collaborative robot safety under ISO 10218 and ISO/TS 15066; Arduino and Raspberry Pi prototyping; servo/stepper motion control and encoders; automation sensors; PLC ladder logic (IEC 61131-3); robot path planning (A*, RRT, potential fields); industrial robot programming across vendor languages; and digital twins.
The full robotics and automation engineering stack in 18 sections: robot architectures and the 6-DOF standard, Denavit-Hartenberg parameters and forward/inverse kinematics, ROS vs ROS2 (nodes, topics, services, actions, DDS middleware), the Nav2/MoveIt/SLAM software stack, machine vision cameras and sensors (area-scan vs line-scan, CCD vs CMOS), machine vision lighting techniques (backlighting, dark-field, diffuse), machine vision applications (dimensional measurement, OCR/barcode, bin picking), collaborative robot safety under ISO 10218-1/-2 and ISO 12100, the four ISO/TS 15066 collaborative operation modes, Arduino and Raspberry Pi for automation prototyping, servo vs stepper motor control, incremental vs absolute encoders, automation sensors (inductive, capacitive, photoelectric, force/torque), PLC ladder logic programming, robot path planning algorithms, industrial robot programming fundamentals across vendor languages, MBSE and digital twins, and a closing quick-reference section.
Use the Prev / Next buttons at the bottom, or press the arrow keys on your keyboard. Click the ☰ menu button in the top-right corner to open the table of contents and jump directly to any of the 18 sections. The lime progress bar at the top tracks your position through the handbook. Scroll the mouse wheel to advance or go back.
This handbook is built for automation engineers, controls engineers, robotics students, and technicians who need a fast, accurate reference spanning both the mechanical/kinematic side of robotics and the software/controls side of automation. It complements the studio's Tools (robot type selector, motor sizing calculator, kinematics visualizer, cobot safety distance calculator) and its Articles, which go into each topic in more depth with worked examples and FAQs.
A rigid body in 3D space has six degrees of freedom — three for position (X, Y, Z) and three for orientation (roll, pitch, yaw) — so a robot generally needs six independently controlled joints to reach any position with any orientation. This is why the 6-axis articulated arm is the standard "fully flexible" industrial configuration. Robots with fewer axes, like a 4-DOF SCARA, deliberately trade orientation flexibility for speed and rigidity where the task doesn't require arbitrary tool angles.
ROS 1 is the original framework, now in maintenance mode, with its final long-term-support release (Noetic Ninjemys) reaching end-of-life and no further ROS 1 releases planned. ROS 2 is the actively developed successor, built on DDS (Data Distribution Service), which removes the single central roscore process ROS 1 required and adds native multi-robot support. Nearly all new robotics work targets ROS 2 today.
No. ISO/TS 15066 defines four collaborative operation modes (safety-rated monitored stop, hand-guiding, speed and separation monitoring, and power and force limiting) and, for power and force limiting, provides biomechanical force and pressure limit tables for specific body regions rather than a single universal speed number. Each application — end effector, payload, and speed combination — must be validated against those limits individually.
No. Arduino boards include a built-in analog-to-digital converter (ADC), so pins A0–A5 read a varying voltage directly. Raspberry Pi GPIO pins are digital-only with no built-in ADC — reading an analog sensor on a Pi requires an external ADC chip, commonly the MCP3008, connected over SPI. This is one of the most common gotchas for engineers moving from Arduino to Raspberry Pi.
A* is Dijkstra's algorithm plus an admissible heuristic (an estimate of remaining distance to the goal), and it works well in lower-dimensional, well-discretized spaces like a 2D warehouse floor, guaranteeing the shortest path on the grid it searches. RRT (Rapidly-exploring Random Tree) scales far better to high-dimensional configuration spaces, such as a 6-axis arm's joint space, by incrementally sampling rather than exhaustively searching — but the raw path it finds is usually not optimal and typically needs smoothing afterward.
Disclaimer: This reference guide summarizes publicly available engineering standards and principles for educational purposes only. Always consult the official adopted edition of the applicable standard (ISO, IEC, ANSI/RIA, etc.) for design, engineering, and safety compliance decisions. Standards referenced herein are copyright their respective organizations (ISO, IEC, and others).