Acquiring change models for sensor-based robot manipulation

The aim of this paper is to enable a programmer to easily employ external sensors for flexible robot manipulation. We describe a general approach to determine the relation between the position deviation of an object and the resulting data from sensors used to recognize this deviation. This information can be used to employ adaptation techniques to compensate the deviation thus enabling robots to react flexibly to changes such as workspace variations or object drifts. The proposed methods are designed to be independent of the type of sensor. We describe methods to automatically determine a function describing this relation and how adaptive techniques can be integrated easily into robot programs without detailed knowledge provided by the programmer.