Building fast, intelligent robot systems

Conventional robot systems operate slowly and methodically, often playing back a pretaught sequence ofpositions. To investigate the construction offast, intelligent robot systems, we have built a robot pingpong player. We will examine the techniques required to cope with a dynamic environment, from the vision system to the robot's low-level control algorithms. We also describe an "expert controller," which executes loosely specified strategies in real time in spite of constraints imposed by the robot and by task geometry.