A hierarchical extension of manipulation primitives and its integration into a robot control architecture

Manipulation Primitives are state-of-the-art for describing and performing complex manipulation tasks - especially in industrial applications. They combine easy task specification and execution which are key components for the success of this paradigm. However, there are some flaws when describing a complex task by decomposing it into Manipulation Primitives. For instance, the relations between the individual Manipulation Primitives cannot be captured by the original definition but have to be defined in additional glue code. This contribution introduces an extended definition of Manipulation Primitives to describe manipulation tasks as hierarchical structures using Manipulation Primitives at each level of the hierarchy. Additionally, a concept for a generic control architecture is presented which is capable of meeting the requirements of the extended Manipulation Primitive concept and which can be easily plugged“ together using modular code blocks.”