Design Studies on Industrial Robots

Summary

The Robot (a machine pre-programmed to do any one of a range of complex manipulative tasks) is in a very early stage of development because all the ones in industry have no sensory adaptability and cannot do tasks involving moving themselves about the factory. Most of the work on giving them touch, force and visual senses requires a large computer to enable them to adapt their movements to sense impressions in the pre-instructed way. Our work is concerned with developing sensory systems which can be readily adapted to different complex situations using only small digital or analogue computers or devices like un-selector switches. We have built a device that seeks out, picks up and carries away objects of widely varying size and shape placed at random on a table, a hand that grasps an object of varying size with a light or a heavy grasp and we arc designing a self-propelling carriage in which a scale plan of the permissible paths in any factory can be placed and it will follow these paths by dead reckoning, avoid unexpected objects and locate itself accurately by tactile sensors.