A RISC APPROACH TO SENSING AND MANIPULATION

This article describes sensing and manipulation strategies that use simple, modular robot hardware. To bridge the gap between automation and robotic technologies, we suggest that traditional automation hardware, such as parallel-jaw grippers and optical beam sensors, can be combined with geometric planning and sensing algorithms. The resulting systems should be cost-effective, reliable, and easy to set up and reconfigure. They should also be flexible enough to support small batch sizes and rapid changes in part design needed in forthcoming flexible/agile manufacturing systems. The RISC acronym, borrowed from computer architecture, suggests the parallels between the two technologies. RISC robots perform complex operations by composing simple elements. The elements may be individual light beam sensors, grouped together to form an array for recognition. Or a complex manipulation task may be performed via a sequence of grasp steps by different grippers specialized for acquisition and placement. This article emphasizes three areas: (i) RISC sensing, primarily optical beam sensing, (ii) RISC manipulation using simple parallel-jaw grippers or minimal configurations of fingers, and (iii) Computer-aided design of RISC workcells. (C) 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.