Robotics最新文献

The wabot-2 is an anthropomorphic robot playing keyboard instruments, developed by the study group of Waseda University's Science and Engineering Department.

The wabot-2 is equipped with hands tapping softly on keys, with legs handling bass keys and expression pedal, with eyes reading a score, and with a mouth and ears to converse with humans. Based on wabot-2, wasubot has been developed by Sumitomo Electric Industries Ltd., whose artistic skill has been demonstrated in performing music at the Japanese Government Pavillion in Expo'85.

The present paper summarizes the wabot-2's motion, visual and vocal subsystems as well as its supervisory system and singing voice-tracking subsystem.

Part manipulation by a robot is practicable provided the orientation of the presented part is known. Traditionally, a multi-part feeder will consist of either a number of dedicated feeders or else of plain feeders equipped with sophisticated electronics. The development of an inexpensive feeder with an uncomplicated recognizing device might be a good alternative. Two recognizing devices of this kind are described. One device includes a moving belt, 3 sensors, and a programmable logic controller, but the device is dedicated to one particular part. The other device consists of a moving belt, 16 sensors, and a microcomputer. This device has self-learning capability. Both devices are able to offer information about the orientation of the part that will be presented to a robot.

The continuously growing rate of production and use of industrial robots has proved that, in parallel with other implementation aspects, due attention should be paid to problems related to their operational safety. Safety has to be planned and built in at the level of robot workplaces.

Although safety problems are encountered by various groups of personnel, it is mainly the programmer and the trouble-shooter who are at risk.

There are lacunae in the safety provisions which could be bridged, on the one hand, by developing more appropriate safety equipment and, on the other, by imposing minimal safety requirements upon all robots as well as by giving examples for a safe design of robot workplaces.

A robot activity study was conducted for the U.S. Bureau of the Census in late 1985 to provide a detailed picture of the current and planned use of robotics in San Diego County, California. The results indicate an increasing usage rate, expectations of decreasing costs, and minimal employment effect to date, but perceptions of an increased impact. The current and future use of robotics in 65 companies is presented here as a series of charts.

Light-stripping, whereby a laser or other source of a stripe of light in conjunction with a single camera can provide three-dimensional information of a scene, can be used to estimate the volume of a seam gap for welding, filling, or gluing robots, and thus provide automated feedrate control. The geometry of light-striping systems is analyzed to yield an efficient method to map the locations of stripe pixels in the image to three-dimensional coordinates. Methods are discussed to determine fill-points by recognizing the pattern produced by seam walls despite noise. Combined with computation of areas and volumes, the steps simplify to an effective algorithm for microprocessor implementation.

An international conference entitled “Intelligent Autonomous Systems” was held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from 8–11 December 1986.

Following the “Introductory Address” presented by chairman L.O. Hertzberger (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) there were eight invited papers which considered the theoretical and practical aspects of designing and operating autonomous systems. A further sixty-two papers were presented which provided an in-depth analysis of intelligent autonomous systems.

We present below a report on the lectures delivered at the conference.