Of all the fields of modern technology, robotics is likely to be one of the most influential in changing the very nature of our society.

In the past, the term "robot" has tended to conjure up pictures of automatonlike machines, often seen as a threat to people themselves. The concept of the robot goes back many decades, but-with the introduction of modern microelectronics - the whole field of robotics has been given a new impetus and exciting prospects. We can achieve almost automatic manufacture of a whole range of goods and products. Moreover, these can be made by robots with consistency of quality, both in mass production and in smaller batches. The manufacturing operations which can be automated are not only those of assembly but also of joining.

Vibrations in robot action, both in the arm control system and arm itself, and in the transported load, are a serious problem in the development of high speed systems. The paper discusses the typical causes of vibration resulting from the motion command in path controlled robots and those due to the failure of a system to meet the specified command through power and performance limitations. Experimental results illustrating such phenomena are presented. Methods of reducing the magnitude or occurrence of such vibrations through the improved design of motion commands, which take account of the vibratory nature of the system and load, are presented.

An active force control system for robotic deburring based on an active end effector is developed. The system utilizes a PUMA-560 six axis robot. The robot's structural dynamics, positioning errors, and the deburring cutting process are examined in detail. Based on ARMAX plant models identified using the least squares method, a discrete PID controller is designed and tested in real-time. The control system is shown to maintain the force within l N of the reference, and reduce chamfer depth errors to 0.12 mm from the 1 mm possible without closed-loop control.

By using very simple considerations related to the mechanical Lagrangian itself, one obtains a new general class of parameter adaptation algorithms for robot manipulators, which provides such approaches as PID adaptation schemes. These models could apply to random structural mechanical Systems, subject to the conditon that they are defined by Lagrangians.

The general problem of including impulse effects in Lagrangian dynamics is discussed. A self-consistent method is developed, and a block-diagram representation, including initial conditions, is introduced that displays the feature of the method. Example of a collision of two dissimilar robots is provided for illustration.

Minimum distance algorithms may be used in robotic simulation programs to provide the user with the distances of approach of the manipulator to obstacles in the work environment; this is important for task planning using graphical simulation of configuration maps, and for the implementation of automatic detection of (imminent) collision in robot task development Systems that are based on a graphical simulation facility. In this paper we present algorithms that may be used for the calculation of distances between objects, not necessarily convex, that are made up of unions of convex polyhedra and cylindrically shaped objects (where the cross-section of the cylinder may be ellipsoidal, rather than circular).

The Flight Telerobotic Servicer (FTS) is a robotic device which will be used to build and maintain Space Station Freedom. The FTS is expected to evolve from its initial capability of teleoperation toward greater autonomy by taking advantage of advances in technology as they become available. In order to support this evolution, NASA has chosen the NASA/NIST Standard Reference model for Telerobot Control System Architecture (NASREM) as the FTS functional architecture. As a result of the definition of generic interfaces in NASREM, the system can be modified without major impact. Consequently, different approaches to solve a problem can be tested easily. This paper describes the implementation of NASREM in the NIST laboratory. The approach is to build a flexible testbed to enhance research in robot control, computer vision, and related areas. To illustrate the real-time aspects of the implementation, a sensory interactive motion control experiment will be described.

A new method for computer forming of dynamic equations of open-chain mechanical robot configurations is presented. The algorithm used is of a numeric-iterative type, based on mathematical apparatus of screw theory, which has enabled elimination of the unnecessary computations in the process of dynamic model derivation. In addition to conventional kinematic schemes of robotic manipulators, the branched kinematic chains which have recently found their application in the locomotion of robotic mechanisms were also treated. Both the inverse and direct problems of dynamics were addressed. A comparative analysis was carried out of the numerical complexity of various existing algorithms of numeric-iterative type dealing with the problems of spatial active mechanisms dynamics. It has been shown that the proposed method regardless of its generality, approaches by its models complexity symbolic models, which are valid for particular robotic mechanisms only where they achieve a high degree of efficiency.