Author Description

Focuses on robotic hands and the control of robot arms and flexible fixturing. This multiauthored work provides a detailed overview of many aspects including: a variety of novel simulation methods used to graphically portray the grasps and tasks the now famous robotic hand from MIT carries out in practice, a new computer-assisted approach to the planning of form closure grasps and gripper design, manipulator dynamics modelling, computer-aided control system design, the application of 'dynamic linearization' to a kinematically redundant planar manipulator, use of dynamic equations and control algorithms for a parallel link manipulator, automation and flexibility in fixturing processes through design of modular and adaptable fixtures which can be robot operated. The final paper describes a flexible robotic system for sheet metal drilling and evaluation of the performance of that system through analysis and experimentation.