Center of Excellence in Aerospace Manufacturing Automation

Air Force support of a Center of Excellence at Stanford University has provided the impetus and core for a major new entity, the Center for Automation and Manufacturing Science CAMS. The new center draws from two well- known research groups at Stanford the Robotics Group of Stanfords Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Automatic Control Group of Stanfords Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Ten professors and some 50 graduate students are participating in CAMS activities. CAMS in turn is the first of a new complex of centers at Stanford involved in the manufacturing enterprise the Stanford Institute for Manufacturing and Automation SIMA. Strong industrial interaction is a primary objective of SIMA. In our Air Force program we are focusing on robotic aspects of automation. Our goal is to make fundamental contributions to the underlying set of technologies that will enable the next generation of industrial robots to be far more capable than todays - will enable them to be lightweight, limber, deft, facile, quick, friendly, low-powered, seeing, sensing, thinking machines that can reason and strategize- can carry out tasks assigned at a high conceptual level. Specifically, our research focus is on fast, precise control of lightweight flexible manipulators, sensing, especially optical and tactile sensing, intelligent systems for robot task management, and computer vision for robot management. We are addressing the question of how to provide manipulator control so good that a whole new generation of manipulators can be developed-manipulators that are much lighter and far more facile than anything todays control systems could stably manage.