Knowledge-Based Robot Workstation: Supervisor Design

There are several problems currently inhibiting the growth of automation in industry. In particular, the growing interest in the application of robots to assembly tasks is being limited by the way such tasks are programmed and executed. Current robotic assembly systems force an exact, detailed description of the task to be executed. To perform a given assembly task, the detailed actions of the robot, as well as the successive positions and orientations of the gripper, must be specified. In addition, the work environment of the robot and the state of the objects in it must be completely controlled for the robot to successfully accomplish its task. These requirements could be reduced by the use of a variety of sensors and, in this way, allow the degree of uncertainty in the environment to be increased. Nevertheless, the use of sensors alone could also make the prograrnming phase more difficult.