Experiments with a 3DD robotic manipulator operating by a sensor-based assembly

In the sensor-based navigation, a mobile robot arrives at its goal surely if there is a path to the goal in a 2D uncertain environment, otherwise, the robot recognizes no deadlock-free path automatically. We call this the deadlock-free characteristic. Based on this characteristic, all the previous sensor-based algorithms are classified into metric, topologic, and geometric ones, and also robustness of each algorithm is discussed against sensor, position and orientation errors. In this paper, we apply these fruitful results to the manipulation, i.e., assembly or parts mating. As compared with the navigation, the manipulation needs not consider any nonholonomic characteristic, but deals with a large number of degrees of freedom. In this paper, we propose a metric sensor-based assembly algorithm for a manipulator with three or more degrees of freedom and then show its feasibility by experimental results using a 3DD manipulator with a 6D force sensor