Intelligent automation of industrial machines

In most industrial processes like deburring, milling, grinding, etc., the machine tools or robotic manipulators are generally moved at a predetermined speed relative to the work-piece. Their speed is generally not responsive to the amount of material the tools have to remove off the work-piece. In this paper this conventional mode of operation is going to be referred to as "brute force mode" of operation. A number of other control methods under titles like "Impedance Control", "Force-Velocity Control", "Force-Velocity-Position Control", "Hybrid Control", "Compliance Control", "Force-Trajectory Control", etc. have been proposed, studied and experimented with. They are all somewhat responsive to the environment. Practically all of them apply a relatively compliant force (some times referred to as a force control) tangential to the desired work-piece contour, and relatively stiff control (often referred to as trajectory control) is applied normal to the desired contour. In the current paper a schema for an intelligent control of robotic manipulators is being described. The schema emulates the response of an intelligent operator to changing environmental conditions. We are in the process of simulating the proposed schema on computer.<
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