Tim@UPENN.CSNET (Tim Finin) (02/26/86)
From: Tim Finin <Tim%upenn.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA>
Colloquium
3pm Thursday, February 27, 1986
216 Moore School, University of Pennsylvania
TOPICS IN THE OFF-LINE PROGRAMMING OF ROBOTS
Vincent Hayward
Computer Vision and Robotics Lab., McGill University
Programming robots is a difficult task, even in the case of the simplest
applications. For this reason, research in robot programming has been evolving
in two distinct directions. The first one is aimed at constructing goal driven
automated robot programming systems. Another trend is to design so-called
off-line programming systems to ease the work of a human robot programmer.
These systems include a set of programming aids such as graphic facilities,
reporting of performances, interfaces to CAD/CAM systems, and pleasant user
interfaces. In the view of developing off-line programming systems, I will
first present solutions to the problem of collision detection. These methods
belong to a continuum of schemes according to the method selected for
representing the workspace and the robot, and the amount of computations
performed before testing a particular trajectory. I will then discuss a method
based on a recursive decomposition of the workspace, also referred to as an
octree model, as a good tradeoff for a class of applications. I will then
present a project currently underway aimed at the construction of CAD models
from range data which will also facilitate the programming of robots. Finally,
I will discuss the adequacy of current robot programming primitives and propose
a new scheme based on how sensors interact with robot control systems.