Robot Placement
Overview
Proper placement
of the base of a robot manipulator is an important issue in many robotics
applications. For instance, in manufacturing, the base location of a manipulator
has a significant impact on the cycle time of tasks such as spot welding
and inspection. An automated means to determine the best placement can
both increase the throughput of workcells and reduce set-up time. This
work investigates methods that employ randomized motion planning techniques
to search for the best placement efficiently.
An
iterative robot placement algorithm
Our
algorithm computes simultaneously a base location and a corresponding collision-free
path that are optimized with respect to the execution time of tasks. The
algorithm has been tested on both synthetic examples and real-life CAD
data from the automotive industry.
   
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| Four
test scenes (click to enlarge the images). |
There
is a QuickTime movie for one of the computed examples. The movie clip first
shows a PUMA arm at some arbitrary initial base location and executing
a path computed by a randomized motion planner, and then shows the manipulator
performing the same task after path and base location optimization.
References
 D. Hsu, J.-C. Latombe, and S. Sorkin.
Placing a robot manipulator amid
obstacles for optimized execution. In Proc.
IEEE International Symposium on Assembly and Task Planning,
pages 280-285, 1999.
(Postscript, 1.1MB |
PDF, 0.2MB)
People
Acknowledgment This research has been supported by a grant from SIMA (Stanford Integrated
Manufacturing Association), ARO MURI grant DAAH04-96-1-007, a Microsoft
Graduate Fellowship, General Motors Corp., and Deneb Robotics Inc.
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Maintained by David
Hsu Last modified: Sun Jan 3 20:36:43
PST 1999
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