Identification and verification of termination conditions in fine motion in presence of sensor errors and geometric uncertainties

The authors´ long-term goal is to discover reasonable constraints under which an automatic uncertainty-handling strategy (for robot part-mating tasks) is guaranteed to succeed. As the first step they introduce a concept of contact formations to describe contacts among parts in a system, aiming at reducing the dimensionality of assembly verification. They also describe a technique for identifying contact formations in spite of errors in sensing and geometric uncertainties. It is impossible to verify termination conditions in general. The notion of design constraints is introduced, and design constraints for which verification can be guaranteed are formulated. The constraints are reasonable in the sense that they do not impose unrealistic conditions on typical designs. Results of implementation on a robot system consisting of PUMA robot with RTI force/torque sensors support the theoretical derivations and show empirically that the theoretical constraints can be relaxed somewhat and good results still be obtained