NASA SBIR 01-1 Solicitation

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (LIMIT 200 WORDS)
Energid Technologies will create a generic control mechanism for kinematically redundant serial and bifurcating manipulators. This proposal seeks to extend an augmented Jacobian technique recently published by Energid personnel by 1) adding a post-processing step to increase its robustness and 2) writing an eXtensable Markup Language (XML) based description language for the framework to allow control system supervision and modification. The new system will be implemented in C++ toolkit form. This will provide in one compact framework both the direct capabilities provided by many existing robot-control techniques as well as more-robust extensions of those techniques. This new framework will be designed to allow the easy creation of supervised and traded control systems.

POTENTIAL COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS
The total market value of robots installed worldwide was $5.1 billion in 1998. Of this market, commercial applications for redundant manipulators in particular is large and growing. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has sold hundreds of their PA-10 seven-joint manipulator systems alone, and many other companies provide similar redundant arms, including Barrett Robotics and Robotics Research Corporation. Kinematically redundant manipulators offer many very valuable features and will be part of most future robotic systems. Applications include any task for which a robot is substituted for a human being, as humans are kinematically redundant. Developers of kinematically redundant systems will need a software foundation on which to build. We will provide that foundation by developing our toolkit as a commercial product.

NAME AND ADDRESS OF PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR (Name, Organization Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip)
Bradley Williams
Energid Technologies
258 Belmont Street
Watertown , MA   02472 - 3563

NAME AND ADDRESS OF OFFEROR (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip)
Energid Technologies
258 Belmont Street
Watertown , MA   02472 - 3563