Multi-sensor integration and sensor fusion in industrial manipulation: Hybrid switched control, trajectory generation, and software development

The potential of multi-sensor integration in industrial manipulation systems is enormously high - and almost unused in real-world systems and applications. Scientific literature provides plenty of approaches for sensor integration, sensor-guided and sensor-guarded robot control, visual servoing, robot control architectures, and software systems, but it is still one of the major challenges to bring all fields together. Therefore we need a better over-all view onto different domains. This overview paper covers three areas, which play a fundamental role to ldquogluerdquo the above mentioned fields together: 1) The manipulation control system (or architecture) from the control engineerpsilas point of view enabling the usage of hybrid switched systems for robotic manipulation systems. 2) The problem of trajectory generation in hybrid switched control systems. 3) Important aspects on software engineering in the field of robot control architectures. Each of these parts is accompanied by real-world experimental results in order to highlight the relevance and the potential of these technologies.