HANDEY is a task-level robot system that requires only a geometric description of a pick-and-place task rather than the specific robot motions necessary to carry out the task. The HANDEY system, the state-of-the-art technologies for developing it and problems encountered are presented in this text.

The first three chapters introduce the HANDEY system and task-level robot programming systems in general, address the problem of planning pick-and-place tasks, review areas of geometric modelling and kinematics required for subsequent chapters, and introduce the concept of configuration space, which plays a prominent role in HANDEY. The next four chapters describe how HANDEY operates.

Part 1 Introduction: HANDEY
robot programming
why is robot programming difficult?
what HANDEY is and is not. Part 2 Planning pick-and-place operations: examples of constraint interactions
a brief overview of HANDEY
the HANDEY planners
combining the planners
previous work. Part 3 Basics: polyhedral models
robot models
world models
configuration space. Part 4 Gross motion planning: approximating the COs for revolute manipulators
slice projections for polyhedral links
efficiency considerations
searching for paths
a massively parallel algorithm. Part 5 Grasp planning: basic assumptions
grasp planner overview
using depth data in grasp planning
the potential-field planner. Part 6 Regrasp planning: grasps
placements on a table
constructing the legal grasp/placement pairs
solving the regrasp problem in handey
an example
computing the constraints
regrasping using two parallel-jaw grippers. Part 7 Co-ordinating multiple robots: co-ordination and parallelism
robot co-ordination as a scheduling problem
the task completion diagram
generating the TC diagram
more on schedules
other issues. Part 8 Conclusion: evolution
path planning
experimentation
what we learned. (Part contents)