New robots for new tasks

It is the applications which drive the research within the Advanced Manufacturing and Automation Research Centre (AMARC) - not the conventional stereotypical tasks, but rather tasks involving unconstrained and unknown environments, such as cutting meat, handling fish, shaping dough, packaging poultry portions, or manipulating sheets of flexible material. The sense in which AMARC's robots are unconventioanl is the systems approach taken to solve some of the complex tasks rather than the design of the robot - except in one important aspect. When handling non-rigid products it is often beneficial to consider robots with more than one arm. In 1989, a 2-year research contract was initiated with British Aerospace and Sowerby Research Labs to assess the difference between using a single-arm robot and a 2-arm robot to achieve tasks such as 2-part assembly. A further 3-year research contract, which started in March 1990, with four industrial partners (Lucas Engineering and Systems, Krupp Forschungsinstitut, Battelle Europe, and Hitec of Athens) and support from the CEC through BRITE/EURAM, has been designing and building a multi-arm robotic system to automate the manufacture of products made of composite prepreg sheet.