Knowledge-based control with applications to Robots (Q1801267)

This book presents a hierarchical control structure for robotic manipulators. There are three levels used in the hierarchy. At the lowest level hard decoupling and linearising controllers are used at the joints. At the intermediate level knowledge-based controllers are employed again at the joints. Finally at the top, the supervisory human-like controller is employed, using expert knowledge in the form of linguistic rules. This is a fuzzy controller. There is a background work that includes review of hard algorithmic control and knowledge based soft control of manipulators. The reader should be familiar with those two types of control before reading the book. The review is not very extensive but adequate. The control structure is applied via simulation, to a very simple two degree of freedom planar robot with revolute axes. At this point the authors found that the control structure they propose is better than existing ones. However their simulation is not extended to a reasonable six degree of freedom manipulator nor applied directly on line to a real robot in the laboratory. The method needs to be further evaluated and tested with many real experiments. The book is well written and very instructive. It may be used by people who are interested in hierarchical control. At the end, the programming codes are given for the intelligent part of the control. A sun work-station was used for the simulations. The model (two degrees of freedom robot) was programmed in C.