This award will provide an industrial robot arm to be used in three projects. The arm will be controlled by parallel computers available locally at the University of Minnesota. The research projects deal with error correction, motion planning, and control. All of these problems can use the added power of a parallel computer provided that that power can be algorithmically utilized. Thus the research revolves around algorithm development in these areas for a distributed memory multiprocessing environment. Many algorithms used in controlling robots are computationally expensive. One means of providing additional computational power for a reasonable cost is to use parallel computers. This research award is to provide an output device (a robot arm) for use in the investigation of robot control algorithms using parallel computers. The computers already exist at the University of Minnesota so this award enriches the parallel computing research environment and will lead to results on the appropriate hardware/software configurations for effective utilization of robotic devices.
