Proceedings Of The Robotics And Remote Handling In Hostile Environments National Topical Meeting

Microcomputer technology and micromechanical design have contributed to recent rapid advances in Robotics. Particular advances have been made in sensor technology that allow robotic systems to gather data and react "intelligently" in flexible manufacturing systems. The analysis and recording of the data are vital to controlling the robot.In order to solve problems in control and planning for a Robotic system it is necessary to meet the growing need for the integration of sensors in to the system. Control in Robotics and Automation addresses this need. This book covers integration planning and control based on prior knowledge and real-time sensory information. A new task-oriented approach to sensing, planning and control introduces an event-based method for system design together with task planning and three dimensional modeling in the execution of remote operations.Typical remote systems are teleoperated and provide work efficiencies that are on the order of ten times slower than what is directly achievable by humans. Consequently, the effective integration of automation into teleoperated remote systems offers potential to improve remote system work efficiency. The authors introduce visually guided control systems and study the role of computer vision in autonomously guiding a robot system. Sensor-Based Planning and Control in an Event-Based Approach Visually Guided Sensing and Control Multiple Sensor Fuson in Planning and Control System Integration and Implementation Practical Applications

It is a privilege to be asked to introduce this important work. Such a book has long been needed. Industrial manipulators and robots have caught the attention of the general public and become very fashionable in the last few years. The casual reader of current newspapers and magazit:les or the viewer of television and films might easily conclude that the development of mechanical hands, arms and legs or other mobility devices has progressed rapidly in only the last few years. Most people are unaware of the gradual orderly succession of creative designs and painstaking refinements which have been produced over a greater number of years. That story is carefully described in this volume, together with diagrams and photographs which document in detail this elegant phase in the history of machine design. This volume together with Volume 3A constitute the most complete and comprehensive work on manipulators and teleoperators. Jean Vertut and Philippe Coiffet are well known not only as authors but also as engineers who have produced some of the finest devices in the world. Of course for the complete history of manipulators and teleoperators one must look back to the artisans who crafted the delightful clock works, mechanical puppets and toys before and during the Renaissance.

This book provides the National Academy of Sciences' 1995 review of the technology development program for the remediation of the Department of Energy's weapons complex facilities. It makes scientific, technical, and programmatic recommendations to strengthen technology development within DOE and ensure that it meet its goals of cost effectiveness, safety, and decreased risk. The recommendations address DOE's five focus areas: landfill stabilization; contaminant plume containment and remediation; facility transitioning, decommissioning, and final disposition; mixed waste characterization treatment; and high-level waste in tanks. The book also addresses technologies in areas that cross cut the above focus area programs, namely characterization monitoring and sensor technologies, efficient separations and processing, robotics, and waste disposal.