Mechanical Arm Control
Work reported herein was conducted at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research program supported in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense and monitored by the Office of Naval Research under Contract Number N00014-70-A-0362-0005. Vision Flashes are informal papers intended for internal use.
Working Paper
This paper discusses three main problems associated with the control of the motion of a mechanical arm. 1) Transformation between different coordinate systems used to describe the state of the arm. 2) Calculation of detailed trajectories for the arm to follow when moving from point A to B. 3) Calculation of the forces that must be applied to the joints of the arm to make it move along a specified path. Each of the above problems is amenable to exact solution, however, the resulting equations are, in general, to complex to be used in a real time application. Throughout this paper we investigate methods for getting approximate solutions to these equations.