BACKGROUND Laparoscopic surgery has revolutionized the concept of minimally invasive surgery for the last 3 decades. Robotic-assisted surgery is one of the latest innovations in the field of minimally invasive surgery. Already, many procedures have been performed in urology, cardiac surgery, and general surgery. In this article, we attempt to report our preliminary experience with robotic-assis...

In this paper we present recent experimental results using a novel parallel manipulator operating under Natural Admittance Control performing difficult mechanical assemblies. The example assemblies are components from an automotive automatic transmission. Success depends on appropriate force responsiveness, rather than precise position control. The robotic assemblies are shown to be gentler tha...

We describe the implementation and performance of Archimedes 2, an integrated mechanical assembly planning system. Archimedes 2 includes two planners, two assembly sequence animation facilities, and an associated robotic workcell. Both planners use fully 3 dimensional data. A rudimentary translator from high level assembly plans to control code for the robotic workcell has also been implemented...

W e describe the implementation and performance of Archimedes 2, an integrated mechanical assembly planning system. Archimedes 2 includes two planners, two assembly sequence animation facilities, and an associated robotic workcell. Both planners use fully 3 dimensional data. A rudimenta y translator from high level assembly plans t o control code for the robotic workcell has also been implement...

This paper describes the components (“software agents”) that are needed in an autonomous robotic assembly system. Such a system is called “autonomous” if it is able to cope with all uncertainties in the real-world execution (control and sensing) of an assembly task that was planned off-line, and with the (re)planning itself. For each component, the paper answers the following three questions: W...

Robotic assembly line balancing (RALB) is specific for robotic assembly, where different robots require different assembly times to perform the same task because of their specialization. The problem includes optimal assignment of robots to line stations and balanced distribution of work between different stations. It aims at maximizing the production rate of the line. This problem is solved by ...

This paper describes the components (“software agents”) that are needed in an autonomous robotic assembly system. Such a system is called “autonomous” if it is able to cope with all uncertainties in the real-world execution (control and sensing) of an assembly task that was planned off-line, and with the (re)planning itself. For each component, the paper answers the following three questions: W...

Robotic systems are widely applied in process industry to reduce manufacturing labor costs and increase production productivity. Due to the uncertainties existed in the manufacturing environment, the performance improvement of the assembly process is important yet challenging. This paper proposes a regression-based method to predict the performance of the robotic assembly process. Statistical h...

Majumder, Reif and Sahu have presented a stochastic model of reversible, error-permitting, two-dimensional tile self-assembly, and showed that restricted classes of tile assembly systems achieved equilibrium in (expected) polynomial time. One open question they asked was how much computational power would be added if the model permitted multiple nucleation, i.e., independent groups of tiles gro...