Opportunistic scheduling for robotic assembly

Impressive strides have been made in dealing with the spatial complexity of robotic assembly tasks. Unfortunately, advances in dealing with temporal complexity have not kept pace. It is proposed that one reason for this deficiency is the unnecessary confounding of planning and scheduling. These two activities are differentiated on the basis of knowledge required/knowledge available at robot programming time. It is suggested that giving the robot the ability to reason opportunistically over knowledge of part availability at run time is a practical, efficient way to streamline assembly tasks. Initial experimental results are presented to substantiate this conclusion.