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The purpose of this paper is to introduce a concept of eclecticism for the design, development, simulation
and implementation of a real time controller for an intelligent, vision guided robots. The use of an eclectic
perceptual, creative controller that can select its own tasks and perform autonomous operations is
illustrated. This eclectic controller is a new paradigm for robot controllers and is an attempt to simplify the
application of intelligent machines in general and robots in particular. The idea is to uses a task control
center and dynamic programming approach. However, the information required for an optimal solution
may only partially reside in a dynamic database so that some tasks are impossible to accomplish. So a
decision must be made about the feasibility of a solution to a task before the task is attempted. Even when
tasks are feasible, an iterative learning approach may be required. The learning could go on forever. The
dynamic database stores both global environmental information and local information including the
kinematic and dynamic models of the intelligent robot. The kinematic model is very useful for position
control and simulations. However, models of the dynamics of the manipulators are needed for tracking
control of the robot's motions. Such models are also necessary for sizing the actuators, tuning the
controller, and achieving superior performance. Simulations of various control designs are shown. Much of
the model has also been used for the actual prototype Bearcat Cub mobile robot. This vision guided robot
was designed for the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Contest. A novel feature of the proposed approach lies in
the fact that it is applicable to both robot arm manipulators and mobile robots such as wheeled mobile
robots. This generality should encourage the development of more mobile robots with manipulator
capability since both models can be easily stored in the dynamic database. The multi task controller also
permits wide applications. The use of manipulators and mobile bases with a high-level control are
potentially useful for space exploration, certain rescue robots, defense robots, medical robotics, and robots
that aids older people in daily living activities.
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