A Study on the ERES/WCS as a Part of the Advanced Teleoperator System

It was necessary to improve the manual mode in order to increase the availability of a man-robot system, a part of the human interface technique. Therefore, the Error Recovery Expert System/Cartesian Coordinate System (ERES/CCS), combining the operation by the control program representing autonomy of a robot and the operation by a human representing versatility of a human operator effectively in the view point of human factors engineering, was desigened. The ERES/CCS applying the cartesian coordinate system uses the geometric inverse kinematics for the calculation of the robot joint values. Singularity operation errors and parameter operation errors often occur in this procedure. These two operation errors increase the movement time of the robot and the coordinate reading time during the error recovery task in the ERES/CCS. An Error Recovery Expert System/World Coordinate System (ERES/WCS) was also developed so as to improve the disadvantages of the ERES/CCS. The ERES/WCS aimed to improve the operation by the control program by following studies. First, the WCS, a new coordinate system, in which the work space is regularly divided into equal motion lines by means of functional analysis of each robot joint about the relationship between the robot and the task object is constructed. Second, the linguistic variables for azimuth and posture are inputted by a human operator in order to reduce the burden of the human operator, and the fuzzy set theory is used to reduce the difficulty of the posture control. Third, heuristic rules are developed to calculate the robot joint values, which enable two operation errors not to occur and to make calculation time faster. The ERES/WCS improves the operation by the control program and reduces disadvantages of the ERES/CCS by using these studies.