Why Flexible ?
- Light is good.
- Small is good.
- Thin is good.
Control and performance: Flexible is good.
Modern applications in robotics require greater interactivity of the robot
with its environment, finer manipulation, tighter tolerances, and all these with better performance. Flexibility
is part of the answer to each of these. The ability to control flexible robots translates quite directly to being
able to design robots whose structures are dictated by considerations other than structural rigidity.
Grasping
Grasping with robotic fingers is a difficult endaevour. It involves multiple disciplines in robotics--grasp planning, manipulation, hybrid force-position control, cooperating robots etc. Therefore, it is an example of robotic manipulation which can be used to test out many different ideas in robotics. In itself, it is a problem which is far from solved. It demands stringent performance from the underlying hardware and software. It provides us with an ideal test-bed to test out our ideas with structural flexibility in robots.
Control
Control is at the heart of robotics. We are concerned with the development of general control laws, applicable to entire classes of robots, instead of application and hardware specific controllers. Our endaevor is to identify basic principles which can be used as a basis for the synthesis of controllers for specific robots and tasks.
Experiment
Experimentation provides the final word. Theory developed using system models requires substantiation through experimentation.