Programming Autonomous Assembly Agents: Functionality and Robustness

This paper focuses on the problems associated with instructing assembly robots to perform tasts in an autonomous, reliable, and component way within a real world environment. In the context of achieving these objectives we identify two major limiting factors directly affecting the efficiency, task reliability, and economic viability of robotic systems: programming functionality, and robustness in the face of uncertainity. This paper examines the way these issues have been addressed up to now and explains the present research effort in Edinburgh University. It also reports on our experimental domain which is complex form of the "blocksworld". This naturally generalises to assembling walls from predominantly rectangular components, and is designed to cope with variations in part size and location as a fundamental property of the domain.