A RISC APPROACH TO SENSING AND MANIPULATION

This article describes sensing and manipulation strategies that use si mple, 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 combi ned with geometric planning and sensing algorithms. The resulting syst ems should be cost-effective, reliable, and easy to set up and reconfi gure. 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 archi tecture, suggests the parallels between the two technologies. RISC rob ots perform complex operations by composing simple elements. The eleme nts 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 a cquisition and placement. This article emphasizes three areas: (i) RIS C sensing, primarily optical beam sensing, (ii) RISC manipulation usin g simple parallel-jaw grippers or minimal configurations of fingers, a nd (iii) Computer-aided design of RISC workcells. (C) 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.