Manufacturing: Acquiring Craft Skills Through Dialogs

Abstract

Development of programming language research in robotics and manufacturing has stressed the description of actions that constitute a robot task rather than the determination of actual robot movements. For example, the statement "turn the crank on the machine" could cause a task oriented system to automatically plan the necessary robot movements. We show that the latest stage of development in task languages is the inclusion of craft skills that achieve both brevity of expression and represent the sensory-kinematic skills that a human expert would have. A world class pianist knows how to strike the keys, not just that certain keys should be struck. A craft program to solve this kind of problem must be phrased as a multi-part dialog, because solutions must be tried, modified, and retried, interactively with the system components. The craft language (and dialogs) described in this paper is used to program a robotic workstation (i.e., robot, machining center, sensors, fixtures) so that parts can be accurately manufactured with a minimal amount of setup and programming. This work integrates research in task planning and expert systems with new ideas for acquiring sensory-kinematic skills from human experts.