The present surge of interest in robotics can be expected to continue through the 1980s. Major research efforts are springing up throughout industry and in the universities. Senior and graduate level courses are being developed or planned in many places to prepare students to contribute to the development of the field and its industrial applications. Robot Motion will serve this emerging audience as a single source of information on current research in the field.The book brings together nineteen papers of fundamental importance to the development of a science of robotics. These are grouped in five sections: Dynamics; Trajectory Planning; Compliance and Force Control; Feedback Control; and Spatial Planning. Each section is introduced by a substantial analytical survey that lays out the problems that arise in that area of robotics and the approaches and solutions that have been tried, with an evaluation of their strengths and shortcomings. In addition, there is an overall introduction that relates robotics research to general trends in the development of artificial intelligence.Individual papers are the work of H. Hanafusa, H. Asada, N. Hogan, M. T. Mason, R. Paul, B. Shimano, M. H. Raibert, J. J. Craig, R. H. Taylor, D. E. Whitney, J. M. Hollerbach, J. Luh, M. Walker, R. J. Popplestone, A. P. Ambler, I. M. Bellos, T. LozanoPerez, E. Freund, D. F. Golla, S. C. Garg, P. C. Hughes, and K. D. Young.The editors are all research scientists at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and in addition, Michael Brady is coeditor with Richard Paul of The International Journal of Robotics Research. Robot Motion is included in the MIT Press Artificial Intelligence Series.