Fundamental concepts for the analysis, design, and control of robots are presented. Yoshikawa covers all traditional aspects of kinematics, dynamics, position control, and force control in addition to discussing the control of redundant manipulators.

This well-written and clear book goes through the theoretical fundamentals in a systematic and concise way. Many examples are developed in the text, and a reasonable collection of exercises appears at the end of each chapter (some solutions are given in an appendix). Appendices provide a crisp overview of topics such as pseudoinverses, singular value decomposition, and Lyapunov stability theory.

An entire chapter is devoted to manipulability. Measures of manipulability are defined from a kinematics and dynamics point of view, and the author shows how to evaluate these measures quantitatively for a variety of robots and multijoint fingers. The chapter on force control covers passive and active impedance control and hybrid control. Many examples are given for different manipulators. For manipulators with redundant degrees of freedom, the author presents a method that utilizes the redundancy. The method decomposes the task into subtasks with a priority order. This decomposition makes it possible to avoid obstacles and to avoid singular configurations of the manipulator.

The book is relatively short but full of information packaged in a clear and well-organized way. I find it useful as a reference, but I imagine it will work as a textbook as well.