Control Primitives for Robot Systems

Authors:
Deno, D. Curtis
Murray, Richard D.
Pister, Kristofer S.J.
Sastry, S. Shankar
Technical Report Identifier: ERL-90-39
May 1990

Abstract: Inspired by the organization of the mammalian neuromuscular system, this report develops a methodology for description of hierarchical control in a manner which is faithful to the underlying mechanics, structured enough to be used as an interpreted language, and sufficiently flexible to allow the description of a wide variety of systems. We present a consistent set of primitive operations which form the core of a robot system description and control language. This language is capable of describing a large class of robot systems under a variety of single level and distributed control schemes. We review a few pertinent results of classical mechanics, describe the functionality of our primitive operations, and present several different hierarchical strategies for the description and control of a two-fingered hand holding a box. An implementation of the primitives in the form of a Mathematica package is given in an appendix. ~.