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A journey from robot to digital human : mathematical principles and applications with MATLAB programming
Gu E., Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated, Berlin, Germany, 2013. 699 pp. Type: Book (978-3-642390-46-3)
Date Reviewed: Mar 18 2014

With close to 700 pages, this enticingly titled book can be used as a textbook or as a reference book. It includes coverage of the standard topics that appear in robotics textbooks, including a chapter with an overview of the mathematics of vector spaces and chapters devoted to rigid motions, robot kinematics, redundant robots, robot dynamics, and robot control. There are many examples of MATLAB code throughout the book, and many figures are used in the text to support the material presented. There are also exercise problems at the end of each chapter, which can be used in college courses or by readers who want to practice what they have learned in the text.

The last part of the book covers modeling human bodies, particularly their kinematics and dynamics. This part is less extensive than the previous part on robotics. A reader interested in modeling humans and human motions might be disappointed that the majority of the book is on robotics and not digital humans.

Notably, there are two chapters on digital mockup and 3D animation: one is devoted to robot arms and the other to human motions. The chapter on the digital mockup and animation of robot arms starts by showing how to use MATLAB primitives to build elementary objects, such as cylinders and spheres, which MATLAB can display graphically. It then talks about how to build models of manipulators and how to define the corresponding homogeneous transformation matrices. It also provides the equations for 3D animation. However, it does not provide the corresponding MATLAB code. It would have been valuable for the reader to get complete working code for the animation of the simple robot arm presented in the chapter. This would have been a valuable steppingstone for the design of programs to animate the more complex arms and the Stewart platform that are shown in the same chapter.

The chapter on human modeling and 3D animation includes most of the MATLAB code to build a mannequin and the corresponding homogeneous transformation matrices. It also includes a detailed model of a human hand, with the Denavit-Hartenberg tables for all the fingers. The MATLAB code provided is valuable, but the specific mannequin is hard coded, so it is not obvious to the reader how to change the code to model a different mannequin with different dimensions or different body parts. The chapter on dynamics for digital humans includes a detailed example of modeling human body motions in a car crash simulation.

Having extensive MATLAB code is a unique feature of this book, because it encourages the reader to try the computations described in the book and to learn by experimenting. However, the limitations of the code provided and the lack of complete code for at least some of the examples reduce its value. A companion website with the MATLAB code would have added value to the book.

Reviewer:  M. Gini Review #: CR142093 (1406-0420)
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Robotics (I.2.9 )
 
 
Matlab (G.4 ... )
 
 
Model Development (I.6.5 )
 
 
Model Validation And Analysis (I.6.4 )
 
 
Mathematical Software (G.4 )
 
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