Kali: An Environment for the Programming and Control of Cooperative Manipulators

The paper describes the design of a controller for cooperative robots designed at McGill University in a collaborative effort with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The first part of the paper discusses the background and motivation for multiple arm control. Then, a set of programming primitives, which permit a programmer to specify cooperative tasks are described. Motion primitives specify asynchronous motions, master/slave motions, and cooperative motions. In the context of cooperative robots, trajectory generation issues are discussed and our implementation briefly described. The relations between programming and control in the case of multiple robot are examined. Finally, the paper describes the allocation of various tasks among a multiprocessor computer.