Until now, many design and manufacturing tasks have only seen partial computerization. One such task is that of assembly planning. This paper presents a system for use in a subarea of assembly planning, the configuration of grippers for robotic assembly. The system is fully automated and thus represents a departure from current practice. The paper gives an example of the application of the system to simple gripper design problems.

In this paper the problem of swing-up control of an under-actuated, three-link robot gymnast (Robogymnast) is discussed. Robogymnast mimics the human acrobat who hangs from a high bar and tries to swing-up to an upside-down position with his/her hands still on the bar. Unlike human acrobats, Robogymnast’s hands are firmly attached to a freely rotating high bar mounted on ball bearings. Although this helps during the swing-up phase, it poses a great challenge to balancing the robot at the upright position.

This paper focuses on the development of intelligent multiagent robot teams capable of acting autonomously and of collaborating in a dynamic environment to reach team objectives. The paper proposes a new adaptive action selection architecture that enables a team of robot agents to achieve adaptive cooperative control and modify their performance during the specified time of the mission. These abilities are important because of uncertainty in the environmental conditions and because of possible functional failures in some team members.