How a Robot Should Die: Phase 5, Lifecycle KPIs, and One Welding Arm's Four Years
When is a robot's time up? RSF's four-dimension scoring matrix, Data Erasure Certificates, hazmat compliance, and five KPIs that measure the lifecycle.
Fix One Machine, Improve the Fleet: Phase 4 and the Closed Loop
Repairs that teach nothing repeat forever. Inside RSF Phase 4: the eight-step corrective process, five RCA triggers, and the Known Fault Library loop.
Your Three-Shift Robot Is on a One-Shift Maintenance Plan: Phase 3 and the PM System
A three-shift robot on a one-shift maintenance plan ages at triple speed. RSF Phase 3: three PM tiers, three trigger models, environmental corrections.
Skip the Gate, Own the Liability: Phase 2 and the Stage Gate Mechanism
RSF defines two hard stops around robot commissioning. Bypass SG1 and safety liability shifts to you; skip SG2 and your SLA loses its evidence base. Inside.
Robotics: Modelling, Planning and Control Siciliano, Sciavicco, Villani & Oriolo — RSF Specialist Shelf · Book S6 of 6
Siciliano's single-narrative counterpart to the Springer Handbook: kinematics through force control and visual servoing in one consistent notation. 4/5.
Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction Richard S. Sutton & Andrew G. Barto — RSF Specialist Shelf · Book S5 of 6
“It's the AI” will not satisfy an OEM support call. Sutton & Barto turn that into something a service engineer can investigate. Free PDF, Part I 4/5.
Small Unmanned Aircraft: Theory and Practice Beard & McLain — RSF Specialist Shelf · Book S2 of 6
Beard & McLain derive the fixed-wing autopilot the RSF Top 10 never does: successive loop closure on roll, pitch, altitude and airspeed. 4/5.
Underactuated Robotics Russ Tedrake — RSF Specialist Shelf · Book S3 of 6
Legged robots fall over for control reasons, not mechanical ones. Tedrake's free MIT 6.832 notes explain why, and what a controller must do about it.
Planning Algorithms Steven M. LaValle — RSF Specialist Shelf · Book S4 of 6
The reference that treats planning as a subject in its own right: configuration space, sampling-based methods, RRT. Free online, dual difficulty 4/5-2/5.
Handbook of Marine Craft Hydrodynamics and Motion Control Thor I. Fossen — RSF Specialist Shelf · Book S1 of 6
Added mass, wave loading, DVL navigation: the marine GNC reference for USV, ROV and AUV service engineers. The hardest book on the RSF list, 5/5.
Springer Handbook of Robotics B. Siciliano & O. Khatib (eds.) — RSF Top 10 Robot Education Textbooks · No. 10
Eighty-plus chapters, 2,300 pages, nobody reads it cover to cover. It ranks for one reason: when a fault crosses domains, this is the reference of record.
Introduction to Robotics J. J. Craig — RSF Top 10 Robot Education Textbooks · No. 6
Six of ten benchmark universities teach kinematics from Craig. Frames, transforms and D-H parameters: the language vendor manuals already speak.
A Gentle Introduction to ROS Jason M. O’Kane — RSF Top 10 Robot Education Textbooks · No. 9
Most ROS material is for people who build systems. O'Kane wrote for people who must understand one: nodes, topics, where to look. Free, 10-12 hours.
Modern Robotics K. M. Lynch & F. C. Park — RSF Top 10 Robot Education Textbooks · No. 8
The book the field agreed to make free: full preprint PDF, video lectures and open code from the authors. Screw theory and kinematics, taught rigorously.
Probabilistic Robotics Thrun, Burgard & Fox — RSF Top 10 Robot Education Textbooks · No. 7
An AMR that lost localization broke nothing you can touch. Thrun explains Layer 4 faults: belief, Bayes filters, SLAM. Budget 12-15 hours.
Robotics, Vision and Control Peter Corke — RSF Top 10 Robot Education Textbooks · No. 5
Most books you read; Corke's you run. Every concept ships as executable Python via the open Robotics Toolbox. The code softens the maths.
Industrial Robotics Fundamentals Ross, Fardo & Walach — RSF Top 10 Robot Education Textbooks · No. 4
The one book on the RSF Top 10 written for the shop floor, not the lecture hall: robot cell safety, installation, maintenance and troubleshooting.
Autonomous Mobile Robots Siegwart, Nourbakhsh & Scaramuzza — RSF Top 10 Robot Education Textbooks · No. 3
AMR and AGV fleets are the biggest robot service market. Siegwart decodes the vendor manual: odometry, localization, cost maps.
ITIL Foundation: ITIL 4 Edition PeopleCert — RSF Top 10 Robot Education Textbooks · No. 2
ITIL Foundation: ITIL 4 Edition (AXELOS / TSO) — RSF Top 10 Robot Education Textbooks, Book 2: IT Service Management
RSF Top 10 Robot Education Textbooks
Robotics has a canon; robot service does not. Ten books scored on adoption, RSF layer coverage, field value and difficulty, plus six specialist picks.
Mechatronics W. Bolton — RSF Top 10 Robot Education Textbooks · No. 1
Bolton's Mechatronics ranks No.1 for robot service engineers: encoders, drives, sensors and the Layer 2 faults most textbooks skip. Difficulty 2/5.
Robot Initial Parameter Record: Why Day One Data Matters
The Initial Parameter Record captures your robot's baseline on installation day — data that can never be recreated. Inside RSF Phase 1: RACI, IPR, load inertia.
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