Abstract
Within manufacturing industry many assembly and materials handling tasks are labour intensive and do not lend themselves to the application of dedicated machinery carrying out specific repetitive parts of the process. Automation of these processes will require adaptive machinery able to respond to variations in product size, orientation, mechanical properties and the position in which the task is carried out. The potential of intelligent bi-arm robot systems in these areas is discussed in relation to a number of specific bi-arm robot tasks.
The paper also discusses the design of bi-arm systems with reference to a suite of simulation programs for the analysis of workspace quality of branched, serial and closed chain robot configurations. The structure of the program enables the analysis of any robot configuration and provides the means of assessing the strategies required for robot control such as clash detection and trajectory planning.