This award is to purchase a Salisbury dextrous robot hand and a VPL Dataglove to support research on assembly systems. The addition of the robot hand to Carnegie Mellon's existing PUMA arm will form a powerful testbed for research requiring flexible assembly operations. The research projects will be examining issues surrounding the kind of information that should be collected from vision, the kind of suitable description methods, and the kind of assembly operations that can be achieved by an assembly system. In robotic assembly systems, a dextrous hand is essential to extend the research to a wider range or realistic assemblies. An example of such a research project is how to represent a human hand, how to recognize a hand configuration from observation, and how to map such a configuration to a robot hand configuration. Other projects in robotic assembly systems involve evaluating at the design stage, how easily products can be assembled, assembly planning and execution, and establishing a design methodology for computer vision systems with respect to hand-eye systems.
