The focus of this research is to explore the integration of vision and tactile sensing in complex robotic tasks such as manipulation and assembly. The research is being carried on in two separate projects. The first is the creation of a multi-arm robotic test bed that utilizes high speed, frame-rate vision sensing to track a moving part. The visiion system is mounted on a robotic arm and the servo control of the arm is modified by the vision sensing. The vision system will utilize pyramids and scale-space in order to segment and track the objects in real- time.Attached to the robotic arm is an intelligent tactile sensor/gripper that can monitor contact forces and moments, resulting in the secure and stable grasping of the moving part by the visually-servoed gripper. Once the object is grasped, it can be used in coordinated assembly tasks using the two robotic arms. The second project involves the Utah/MIT dextrous hand. The first task is to build a set of higher-level primitives have been defined, they can be combined into a grasping language to create programs of grasping/manipulation sequences. The next task is to develop and evaluate new tactile sensors to be used with the hand in order to support the requirements of intelligent grasping. With the addition of tactile sensory feedback, a hybrid control algorithm will be developed for the hand that utilizes position, force and tactile feedback for hand control.
