Registration Open: Summer/Winter Screws 2017

The Eighth International Summer School on Screw-Theory Based Methods in Robotics
2-10 December 2017
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

The 2017 Summer Screws will be held on a new continent, Australia, and in an unusual month, December. Yet, the time and place could not be more appropriate. It is the beginning of the Southern summer, as befits a summer school, in a time window immediately after IFToMM ISRM 2017 (theInternational Symposium on Robotics & Mechatronics) and right before ACRA 2017 (the Australasian Conference on Robotics andAutomation, the premier yearly robotics event in the region), both held in Sydney.

The location, Monash University, and Australia, is uniquely significant for our core subject. It is where nearly 50 years ago Kenneth H. Hunt and his collaborators revitalized and updated screw theory and started applying it to the emerging field of robotics. As a special feature of the 2017 edition, a number of local guest lecturers, including Kenneth Waldron (Stanford and University of Technology Sydney) and Marcus Pandy (University of Melbourne), will talk about the history of screw theory in Australia and the special
role played by Kenneth Hunt, whom they knew well.

Like every year, Summer Screws 2017 will gather a selection of our regular lecturers, all recognized experts in the robotics applications of screw theory, and up to 40 participants at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia from 2-10 December. The school will teach attendees how to apply existing methods and
empower them to develop new ones in their own research. The basic theoretical notions will be introduced in a rigorous manner, with emphasis on examples, applications, and exercises. As usual, invited speakers from the region will briefly present current and recent work.

MAIN TOPICS

1. Basic vector-space properties of twists and wrenches: physical interpretation of the linear operations; linear dependence and independence, subspaces; bases and coordinates. Screw systems: geometry and classifications. (Dimiter Zlatanov and Marco Carricato)
2. Scalar products, dual spaces, reciprocity. Constraint and freedom in mechanisms. Constraint analysis, type synthesis of single-loop mechanisms, type synthesis of parallel manipulators. (Xianwen Kong, Dimiter Zlatanov, and Marco Carricato))
3. Velocity and singularity analysis of parallel and interconnected-chain mechanisms. Derivation of input-output velocity equations and singularity conditions. (Matteo Zoppi and Dimiter Zlatanov)
4. Mappings between screw spaces, stiffness and inertia. Structure of robot compliance. Eigenvalue problems and eigenscrews. Synthesis with springs. (Harvey Lipkin and Dimiter Zlatanov)
5. 6D formulation of the dynamics of individual rigid bodies and rigid-body systems. Equations of motion. Dynamics algorithms. (Roy Featherstone and Harvey Lipkin)
6. Basic Lie-group theory, matrix representations of the group of rigid-body displacements. Lie algebras as related to screw theory. The exponential map and its applications in modern robotics. (Jon Selig and Peter Donelan)

REGISTRATION

Up to 40 registrations are available at the price of 490 AUD.
Registration Deadline is 10 November 2017.
Limited financial support is available.

Summer Screws 2017 is organized by the Laboratory of Motion Generation and Analysis (LMGA) of Monash Univeristy, Melbourne, Australia and the PMARlab Robotics Group of the University of Genoa, Italy with the financial support of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (IEEE-RAS).

For more information visit the Summer Screws web page: http://www.summerscrews.org/