Online planning of action sequences for a two-arm manipulator system

F_ATE, an online task-level planning system for an advanced assembly robot consisting of two manipulators and a set of different sensors such as an overhead camera and force-torque sensors, is presented. The planning system takes an implicit description of the assembly task, plans a sequence of explicit robot commands and monitors the execution by the real-time robot control system. Because it runs completely online, the planning process is highly reactive using sensor information about the robot´s present environment. This planning integrates as a key feature a dynamic mapping of assembly subtasks ready for execution onto the manipulators available at the moment. The system was implemented in Prolog on a SUN 4/75 SPARCstation running Unix