Combination of strategy investigation and utilization of sensor signals inrobotic assembly

Recently, various kinds of sensor have been widely used in engineering and technological applications. As feedback devices, sensors are anticipated to provide all the information of a dynamic system or at least the informatio n that is necessary in the real-time control process. Therefore much effort has been devoted to the analysis of the influences of noises on the sensor system and the improvement of the control performance. The oversimplificat ion of the utilization process of sensors has led to the lack of motivation in strategy investigation. However, it should be noted that a dynamic system can be described by diffe rent states and the state measured by sensors may be different from that be ing controlled. Also the measured state may not be able to provide all the information required in the control system. This required information can b e defined as information states. Furthermore, in many cases, there is no on e to one relationship between the measured state and the information state. Therefore, it is necessary to analyse the whole system from a higher level . In this paper, a new process has been designed to control the dynamic sys tem with sensor feedback. Based on this process, the strategies that can be used to achieve high-precision robotic assembly operations with force sens ors have been analysed systematically. It is anticipated that this process can be widely used in other applications.