Vision and force driven sensorimotor primitives for robotic assembly skills

Integrating sensors into robot systems is an important step towards increasing the flexibility of robotic manufacturing systems. Current sensor integration is largely task-specific which hinders flexibility. The authors are developing a sensorimotor command layer that encapsulates useful combinations of sensing and action which can be applied to many tasks within a domain. The sensorimotor commands provide a higher-level in which to terminate task strategy plans, which eases the development of sensor-driven robot programs. This paper reports on the development of both force and vision driven commands which are successfully applied to two different connector insertion experiments.