Remotely Controlled Robots and Manipulators

Excerpt from "Remote manipulators and robots fall in the class of robotic manipulation systems widely used in many fields of man's activity. The explosive growth of industrial robotics which relies primarily on true, that is programmable, robots has placed within reach a solution to one of the challenging problems of our time--removal of manual labour from the production sphere. Apart from a substantial increase in productivity owing to a higher rate of production processes, this has materially improved workmanship and operational reliability. However, the use of programmable, or autonomous, robots calls for a good deal of avanced production planning and a more rigorous tie-in between the robots and the other pieces of manufacturing equipment. As a rule, the motions of a robot operation as an integral part of an automatic or automated production line is locked into doing one job or a limited variety of jobs. Owning to their specialization, industrial robots are good at performing specific tasks, such as assembly, welding and spray painting. To show good performance, they have to be perfectly matched to the rest of the plant and operate in a rigourly structured environment. Obviously, if an industrial robot is to be able to operate under varying conditions in the work space, it is essential that some form of adaptation should be designed into its control program. The adaptation capability effected with the aid of input from internal and external sensors adds materially to the complexity of the robotic system and impairs its reliability. Also, it is not at all easy to formalize the environments--the system's work envelope--which is essential when programming the robot's motions for an unstructured environment. For the above reasons, remote control comes in especially useful during the teach mode when a program is entered into an otherwise automatic control system...."