Testing and Control of a Compliant Wrist.

This report summarizes the evaluation of a controllable, instrumented compliant wrist. The design of the wrist and the concept of a remote center of compliance RCC have been described in an earlier report. The wrist is mounted on a large industrial robot used to load precisely machined parts into jigs and fixtures on computer controlled machine tools. The robot and the machine tools form part of an automated cell in which machined parts can be produced with a minimum of human intervention. Loading parts into machine tools is essentially an assembly operation in which the parts are slid into clamps or fixtures and for this reason the RCC techniques that have been developed for assembly robots can also be applied to a machining cell.