SENSOR BASED INTELLIGENT ROBOT CONTROL.

Abstract

The requirement for more sophisticated sensor based robot systems places particular stress on the development of appropriately organized and well suited control philosophies. This is particularly true for flexible robot based manipulation and assembly line tasks. Speed and reliability of response are key requirements, since the turnaround time of the process depends directly on robot speed. Present conventional industrial robot controllers are forced to be unnecessarily conservative by the need to avoid overshoot under varying conditions. Integration of smart (vision/tactile) sensors within the overall control scheme is a key necessity to ensuring an optimal response. The use of VLSI hardware local to the sensor plays an important part in ensuring that the overall control processor does not bear too heavy a computational burden.