Robotics Fundamentals
Six joints. One arm. Everything a mechatronics engineer needs to know before touching a real robot cell — built so you click through it the way you'd trace a kinematic chain: one link at a time.
Anatomy of a robot arm
Every industrial robot — no matter the brand — is described with the same eight words. Learn these, and you can read any robot's spec sheet.
Four families of robot
Robots are grouped by where they work and who they work with — not by how many joints they have.
How a robot decides where to move
Kinematics is the math that connects joint angles to the position of the tool tip — without worrying about the forces involved.
1Target position
You specify where the end effector should go — an X, Y, Z point and an orientation in space.
2Inverse kinematics
The controller calculates the joint angles needed to place the end effector exactly there.
3Forward kinematics
Given those joint angles, the controller can also predict exactly where the tool tip will end up — the reverse calculation, used to check the plan.
4Trajectory
The path and speed profile the arm follows between two points — planned to avoid collisions and stay smooth.
The dotted circle shows every point the tip could reach by changing these two angles alone — a fixed plane. Two joints (two degrees of freedom) can only reach points on that one plane. A 6-axis industrial robot has six degrees of freedom — enough to reach almost any position and orientation in its workspace.
Safety around robot cells
A robot doesn't know you're there unless a sensor tells it. These are the controls that make that true.
Test yourself: flashcards
Read the term, say the definition out loud before you flip. Recalling it yourself is what makes it stick — re-reading the page again will not.
Quick quiz
Eight questions pulling from everything above. No going back once you answer — just like a real exam.