Online planning of action sequences for a two-arm manipulator system

Abstract

F/sub A/TE, an online task-level planning system for an advanced assembly robot consisting of two manipulators and a set of different sensors such as an overhead camera and force-torque sensors, is presented. The planning system takes an implicit description of the assembly task, plans a sequence of explicit robot commands and monitors the execution by the real-time robot control system. Because it runs completely online, the planning process is highly reactive using sensor information about the robot's present environment. This planning integrates as a key feature a dynamic mapping of assembly subtasks ready for execution onto the manipulators available at the moment. The system was implemented in Prolog on a SUN 4/75 SPARCstation running Unix.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>