Toward an assembly plan from observation. I. Task recognition with polyhedral objects

Currently, most robot programming is done either by manual programming or by the "teach-by-showing" method using a teach pendant. Both of these methods have been found to have several drawbacks. We propose a novel method to program a robot, the assembly-plan-fromobservation (APO) method. The APO method aims to build a system that has the capability of observing a human performing an assembly task, understanding the task based on the observation, and generating the robot program to achieve the same task. In particular, this paper defines assembly relations which serve as the basic representation of each assembly task. Then, we verify that such assembly relations can be recovered from the observation of human assembly tasks, and that from such assembly relations, it is possible to generate robot motion commands to repeat the same assembly task. Finally, we demonstrate an APO system based on the assembly relations. iamp*',V M I Q I " , I : T