Date of Award

12-1995

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering

Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Dean Schneider, PhD

Abstract

This thesis represents the first implementation of a proposed Air Force standard telerobotic control architecture. This architecture was developed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the National Institute of Standards and Technology under contract to the Air Force Materiel Command Robotics and Automation Center of Excellence (RACE) as the Unified Telerobotics Architecture Project (UTAP). The AFIT Robotics and Automation Applications Group (RAAG) Lab B facility computational structure was redesigned to be compliant with the UTAP architecture. This thesis shows that the UTAP specification to be implementable. However, if the underlying operating system does not support generic message passing, an interface layer must be implemented to access operating system functions. The UTAP compliant controller implemented the robot servo control, object knowledge base, and user interface components of the specification. The controller performed adequately although there was degradation in the performance as evidenced by increased error during trajectories. We believe this error can be reduced by re-tuning the controller gains. Further study of the UTAP specification is recommended: additional functions such as external sensor readings should be added; implementation of the specification on different operating systems and robot platforms will prove the transportability of the specification.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-GE-ENG-95D-01

DTIC Accession Number

ADA307200

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