EEC-9700702 Abstract The award provides funding to the University of Notre Dame under the direction of Dr. Michael M. Stanisic, for the support of a Combined Research-Curriculum Development project entitled, "Vision-Based Control of Dextrous Manipulators in High Precision Tasks." This project will develop a four-course sequence for upper-level undergraduate and entry-level graduate students at the University of Notre Dame. The sequence will teach students about the design and control of a new class of dextrous manipulators, capable of manufacturing tasks which are prohibitively difficult or costly to achieve with existing technology. The capstone course in the sequence involves students programming a dextrous manipulatory to perform such manufacturing tasks, tasks drawn from an Industrial Advisory Panel, which is a key element of this project. The research aspect of the proposal extends the technologies involved, developing a new type of singularity-free manipulator, as well as extending the calibration-free, vision-based control algorithm to an easily used "point-and-click" means of task programming.
