Abstract: | Assembly robots have failed to live up to their promise of flexibility. We identify this failure as being due to their critical susceptibility to spatial uncertainty, and claim that this is due to the fact that they are designed to be position controlled devices. We describe here a robot system mechanically designed to be inherently accommodating to environmental constraints, thereby allowing its motion to bhe shaped by the mechanics of contact, and a method of controlling this device that is both robust and reliable in the face of spatial variation. Moreover, the independence of this method of control from metric spatial information about the parts involved allows us to realise a task-level programming interface.
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