Teaching Compliant Motion Strategies

A compliant motion strategy causes an object in the grasp of a robot to slide along obstacles in its environment, using them as a guide to a goal region. This communication describes a robot teaching system for compliant motion strategies, based on recent research in compliant motion planning. The teaching system accepts robot motion commands from a user, and attempts to build a compliant motion strategy from the specified motions. The teaching system has several advantages over previous robot teaching systems. The user is spared of many low-level details, such as the specification of conditional tests, compliance parameters, and motion termination conditions. A compliant motion strategy, if found, is guaranteed to work despite uncertainty in the starting configuration of the robot, and in robot sensing and control. © 1989 IEEE