Book excerpt: This book provides detailed fundamental theoretical reviews and preparations necessary for developing advanced dynamics modeling and control strategies for various types of robotic systems. This research book specifically addresses and discusses the uniqueness issue of representing orientation or rotation, and further proposes an innovative isometric embedding approach. The novel approach can not only reduce the dynamic formulation for robotic systems into a compact form, but it also offers a new way to realize the orientational trajectory-tracking control procedures. In addition, the book gives a comprehensive introduction to fundamentals of mathematics and physics that are required for modeling robot dynamics and developing effective control algorithms. Many computer simulations and realistic 3D animations to verify the new theories and algorithms are included in the book as well. It also presents and discusses the principle of duality involved in robot kinematics, statics, and dynamics. The duality principle can guide the dynamics modeling and analysis into a right direction for a variety of robotic systems in different types from open serial-chain to closed parallel-chain mechanisms. It intends to serve as a diversified research reference to a wide range of audience, including undergraduate juniors and seniors, graduate students, researchers, and engineers interested in the areas of robotics, control and applications.