Robot Industry Glossary

The pattern of limb movement during locomotion, such as walking, trotting, or bounding in legged robots.

A Cartesian robot mounted on an overhead frame, offering large work volumes and high payload capacity for pick-and-place and machining.

A probability distribution commonly used in robotics for representing sensor noise, state estimation, and uncertainty.

A popular open-source robot simulation environment (now part of OSRF, often used with ROS).

High-fidelity physics simulation environments used for testing algorithms, training AI agents, and validating launch/robot_bringup.launch configurations before deployment.

A mechanical system, such as a gearbox, that trades speed for increased torque.

A mathematical representation of a robot’s structure describing the spatial relationships between its links and joints.

A pivoted support that allows rotation of an object (camera, sensor) about one or more axes, used in drones and stabilization systems.

Satellite-based positioning systems (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo) used for outdoor robot localization and navigation.

A brand of smart 3D line profilers and inspection sensors used in robotic quality control applications.

An optimization algorithm used in robot learning, inverse kinematics, and neural network training to minimize error functions.

Algorithms that determine how and where a robot should grip an object, considering object geometry, pose, and task constraints.

A classification system for types of robotic grasps (power, precision, pinch, enveloping) based on contact geometry and task.

A type of end effector designed to grasp and manipulate objects using a parallel, vacuum, or magnetic actuation

A robot designed for terrestrial locomotion, encompassing wheeled, tracked, and legged platforms.

A sensor that measures angular velocity (rate of rotation), essential for attitude estimation and stabilization in mobile robots and drones.