A System for Programming and Controlling Sensor-Based Robot Manipulators

摘要

Although a great deal of effort has been spent studying how various forms of sensory feedback can be used to control a robot manipulator, there exists no unified method for specifying robot tasks in terms of sensory information. What all past programming schemes have failed to realize is that external sensors fall into the same class as built-in position or velocity sensors. They all provide information about the state of the manipulator and are potentially useful in controlling its activity. This report presents RSS, a Robot Servo System which is based upon the following concepts: 1) The programmer directly specifies sampled-data servos which establish links between sensory information and manipulator action. 2) Servos for controlling the two spatial aspects (position and orientation) and the two kinesthetic aspects (force and torque), may be specified independently. Any conflicts between the various servos are automatically resolved. 3) Any of the servos may use whatever sensory data is desired. 4) Manipulator positions are specified as the coincidence of some reference point with a goal. Orientation is specified as the alignment of vectors. Using this system, a programmer may specify powerful sensor-driven robot tasks in a manner which corresponds closely to his intuitive ideas about how the task should be performed. (Author)