Control architecture for a robot with visual and tactile capabilities skilled in sorting dishes

The goal of the Cooperating Robot project is to build a robot with visual and tactile skills that is able to work in unstructured environments cooperating with a human operator. The basic idea is to employ the robot for laborious, repetitive, or dangerous work whereas the human acts as a supervisor and handles exceptions. One benchmark problem chosen for the Cooperating Robot (COR) is to remove dishes from trays and put them into a dishwasher. The layout of the controller for the COR, which has to deal with a variety of sensor information and derive appropriate commands for the actuators (more than 20 different ones in the case considered) is described. The controller consists of several finite state machines running in parallel. Each state machine correspond to a task associated with a specific priority. The state machines are synchronized by means of signals. A multiprocessor multitasking development system makes implementation of such a control structure easy. The presented control strategy was proved to deal effectively with the information provided by more than 40 sensors