A manipulation analysis for robot programming

In this paper a procedure is proposed for a rational and optimum use of rob ots. It is the result of the lessons learned by the author in the course of his consultancy and teaching activities on manipulative tasks and programm ing capabilities of robots. One of the chief aims of this paper is educational, and has been set on the basis of students' practice with robots in the Laboratory of Robotics at t he University of Cassino, Italy. A second goal consists in highlighting and teaching how robots' versatility and flexibility can be easily exploited d uring robot's operation when a task is properly modelled through elementary actions. An elementary action, representing a small manipulative operation and consisting in one or few simple instructions given in robot language, can be easily performed by the robot's programming capability. Some example s have been reported to better illustrate the ideas and the procedure propo sed, whose main advantage, also from an educational viewpoint, consist in p roviding a simpler method for analysing manipulations for robot design and programming.