General Resources for the course

This page contains a partial list of handy reference material for the course, including books, software, and tutorials.

Reference books

The following is a list of recommended references for the course. Many of these are freely available online.

[SHV]: M. Spong, S. Hutchinson, M. Vidyasagar, Robot Modelling and Control, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2005.
[Corke] P. Corke, Robotics, Vision & Control. If your institution has SpringerLink access, you can find the downloadable version here. This book includes plenty of Matlab examples, and is generally a delight to read.
[MLS]: R. Murray, z. Li, and S. Sastry, A Mathematical Introduction to Robotic Manipulation, CRC Press. (At this link, you'll find a downloadable pdf.) This book is true to its title - plenty of mathematical rigor here.

The following is a list of more advanced robotics texts that deal with issues related to motion planning.

[Choset]: H. Choset, K. M. Lynch, S. Hutchinson, G. Kantor, W. Burgard, L. E. Kavraki and S. Thrun, Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations,
MIT Press, Boston, 2005.
[Latombe]: Jean-Claude Latombe, Robot Motion Planning, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. (At this link, you'll find a downloadable pdf.)
[LaValle]: Steven M. LaValle, Planning Algorithms, Cambridge University Press. (At this link, you'll find a downloadable pdf.)

Most all of the resources below are available for free on the web.

[AGITR] J. O'Kane, A Gentle Introduction to ROS. This book is based on ROS Indigo and uses C++ for its source code examples.
[MF] A. Martinez and E. Fernandez, Learning ROS for Robotics Programming. Packt Publishing, 2013. This book is available online for UIUC folks (the link above takes you to the UIUC library page for the book). This book is based on the Fuerte distribution of ROS, and includes source code examples in C++.
[QGS] M. Quigley, M. Gerkey; W. Smart, Programming Robots with ROS. This book is available online for UIUC folks (the link above takes you to the UIUC library page for the book). Source code examples in this book are written in Python. This book also describes the ROS ecosystem which includes the ROS wiki and the Question and Answer forum.