This book is intended for a first course in a robotics sequence. There are indeed a large number of books in the field of robotics, but for the engineer or student interested in unmanned aerial or underwater vehicles there are very few books. From the point of view of an aerospace engineer (flight simulation, unmanned aerial vehicles, and space robotics) three-dimensional and parallel mechanisms take on an added significance.

The fundamentals of robotics, from an aerospace perspective, can be very well presented by considering just the field of robot mechanisms. Biomimetic robot mechanisms are fundamental to manipulators and to walking, mobile, and flying robots. A distinguishing feature of the book is that a unified and integrated treatment of biomimetic robot mechanisms is offered.

This book is intended to prepare a student for the next logical module in a course on robotics: practical robot-control design. Throughout the book, in every chapter, are introduced the most important and recent developments relevant to the subject matter. Although the book's primary focus is on understanding principles, computational procedures are also given due importance as a matter of course. Students are encouraged to use whatever computational tools they consider appropriate to solve the examples in the exercises.

When writing this text, I included the topics in my course and some more for the enthusiastic reader with the initiative for self-learning.

Thus, Chapter 1 gives an overview of robotics, with a focus on generic robotic mechanisms, whereas Chapter 2 is about biomimetic mechanisms. Chapter 3 draws attention to the integrated representation of displacement and rotation.