Welcome to The Robotics WEBook, the online PhD-level textbook on the theory and the technology behind robots, machine tools, and other mechatronic devices.
The goals of the WEBook are complementary to other open content initiatives like Wikipedia: the WEBook project develops a textbook and not an encyclopedia. This WEBook textbook could in principle be integrated into Wikipedia's sister project Wikibooks, but isn't (yet) because of the latter's still too limited support for advanced mathematical typesetting, crossreferencing and PDF book production; the WEBook relies on the LaTeX ecosystem to reach these goals.
The WEBook separates basic science and technology topics from robotics-specific topics, in the hope to be able to share the efforts to develop the former with related fields such as computer science, computer vision, systems&control, virtual reality and computer animation, mechatronics, or machine design. The result is a somewhat less integrated textbook than traditional robotics textbooks. However, the more strict modularity of the WEBook has the advantage that teachers can compose their own robotics textbook à la carte.
The material is available as HTML webpages (for browsing), as PDF files (for the highest typographic quality and for printing), but also in LaTeX and SVG source code form (for text and figures, respectively).
This source code availability allows for easy contributions (corrections, additions, etc.) to the WEBook, but also the creation of customized course notes. So, the WEBook wants to be community-driven, with an open source approach:
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The contents of the WEBook is available under a free content license, so you can use it without costs, and adapt it to your particular teaching and studying needs.
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Everybody can contribute to making the WEBook more complete. Contributions can be as simple as feedback via the mailinglist on typographic errors, as constructive as critical (re-)reviews of available material, or as extensive as writing a whole new chapter on a not yet covered topic.
You keep the full copyright of the material you contribute, your name appears on your contributions, but you allow the WEBook to distribute (and adapt) them under its free content license.