A two-armed cooperative robot system `Perseus-1' and its applications to product handling

Abstract

A two-armed robot system `Perseus-1' which includes two arms, the ARM-1 is a floor-installed manipulator of six degrees of freedom (DOF), the ARM-2 an overhead-hanging arm of seven DOF, and a computer system, has been developed. Each arm can have an end-effector including a mechanical hand or a bolt-driver, and a force-torque sensor or a torque sensor. The system can operate the two arms cooperatively based on a set of task-oriented instructions corresponding to the functions of the total system. For example, if a product program is written as: `grasp work; carry work; tighten bolt; ungrasp work.', the system automatically generates the handling sequence referring to the operation set of `grasp', `ungrasp', `push', `carry', `press' and `unpress' for ARM-1 with a two-fingered hand and a force sensor, and the set `push', `pull' and `tighten' for ARM-2 with a bolt-driver and a torque sensor. The experiments have shown the effectiveness of the system.