Failure Tolerant Robots for Industrial Applications

Failure Tolerant Robots for Industrial Applications

K. N. Groom, A. A. Maciejewski and V. Balakrishnan

In Proc. International Robots and Vision Conference, Detroit, MI, May 1997


Abstract: Industrial robot failures occur frequently. The consequences of these failures include loss of production time and the possibility of collisions between the robot, workpiece, and personnel as a result of unanticipated motions of the arm. Improving manipulator reliability through increased component reliability is often prohibitively expensive, and is sometimes beyond current technology. This paper presents an alternate approach toward improving robot reliability in which kinematically redundant manipulators, those with more degrees of freedom than necessary for the production task, are utilized in a failure-tolerant manner to reduce the immediate impact of a failure and, in many cases, allow the robot to continue the task without reprogramming.
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