This award will provide supplementary support to enable Dr. Kevin Cleary, presently of the University of Texas, Austin, to conduct collaborative research for six months with Dr. Tatsuo Arai of the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan. They will explore the potential for incorporating multiple secondary criteria in a motion planning system for robot manipulators. Common industrial manipulators have six degrees of freedom (DOF). Adding additional DOF will potentially extend the capabilities of these manipulators to enable them to perform in obstacle strewn environments, avoid singularities, and be more dextrous. Cleary has developed algorithms for incorporating such multiple secondary performance criteria and has applied these to a seven DOF robot system via computer simulation. Dr. Arai and his colleaques at the Mechanical Engineering Lab have built a direct drive manipulator with seven DOF and applied it to a sewing system. By bringing theory and hardware together, this collaboration should yield insights into the practical implementation of redundant manipulators.
