A Target Approachable Force-Guided Control for Complex Assembly

In this paper, a target approachable force-guided control with adaptive accommodation for the complex assembly is presented. The complex assembly (CA) is defined as a task which deals with complex shaped parts including concavity or whose environment is so complex that unexpected contacts occur frequently during insertion. CA tasks are encountered frequently in the field of the manufacturing automation and various robot applications. To make CA successful, both the bounded wrench condition and the target approachability condition should be satisfied simultaneously during insertion. The bounded wrench condition can be satisfied by properly designing accommodation parameters, which depends on the tolerable stiffness for an assembly task, not to exceed the prescribed contact wrench. On the other hand, the target approachability condition can be satisfied by determining an admissible twist minimizing the deviation between the current and the target twist. By applying the convex optimization technique, an optimum target approaching twist can be determined at each instantaneous contact state as a global minimum solution. Incorporated with an admissible perturbation method, a new CA algorithm using only the sensed resultant wrench and the target twist is developed without motion planning nor contact analysis which requires the geometry of the part and the environment. To verify the feasibility of the new assembly algorithm, a wench sensor model based on a minimum distance algorithm has been developed and used to estimate contact wrenches in graphic assembly simulation. Finally, a VME-bus based real-time control system is built to experiment various CA tasks. T-insertion task as a planar CA and double-peg assembly task as a spatial assembly were successfully executed by implementing the new force-guided control with adaptive accommodation

Compensating for model uncertainty in the control of cooperative field robots

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-123).Current control and planning algorithms are largely unsuitable for mobile robots in unstructured field environment due to uncertainties in the environment, task, robot models and sensors. A key problem is that it is often difficult to directly measure key information required for the control of interacting cooperative mobile robots. The objective of this research is to develop algorithms that can compensate for these uncertainties and limitations. The proposed approach is to develop physics-based information gathering models that fuse available sensor data with predictive models that can be used in lieu of missing sensory information. First, the dynamic parameters of the physical models of mobile field robots may not be well known. A new information-based performance metric for on-line dynamic parameter identification of a multi-body system is presented. The metric is used in an algorithm to optimally regulate the external excitation required by the dynamic system identification process. Next, an algorithm based on iterative sensor planning and sensor redundancy is presented to enable field robots to efficiently build 3D models of their environment. The algorithm uses the measured scene information to find new camera poses based on information content. Next, an algorithm is presented to enable field robots to efficiently position their cameras with respect to the task/target. The algorithm uses the environment model, the task/target model, the measured scene information and camera models to find optimum camera poses for vision guided tasks. Finally, the above algorithms are combined to compensate for uncertainties in the environment, task, robot models and sensors. This is applied to a cooperative robot assembly task in an unstructured environment.(cont.) Simulations and experimental results are presented that demonstrate the effectiveness of the above algorithms on a cooperative robot test-bed.by Vivek Anand Sujan.Ph.D