The Concept of “Attractive Region in Environment” and its Application in High-Precision Tasks With Low-Precision Systems

High-precision manipulation is very important for a variety of tasks in manufacturing. In general, high-precision manipulation is usually achieved by the guidance of high-precision sensors; however, sensorless methods, for some special cases, are more reliable and effective. There are many important works in this aspect 1-3. The concept of “attractive region in environment” (ARIE), which was proposed in our previous works 4-6, provides a prospective approach for low-precision systems to achieve high-precision manipulation. It has been used in various industrial applications, such as robotic assembly 7, grasping 8, and localization 9. ARIE is a region from any point of which the uncertainty of the system can be eliminated by a state-independent input. The utilization of attractive region can be easily understood by the case of a bean in a bowl. For a bean in a bowl, no matter where the initial position of the bean is, it will move to and finally stay at the bottom of the bowl under gravity. Thus, the uncertainty of the bean is eliminated by gravity without any sensor feedback. Inspired by the above case, the general concept of ARIE is proposed and is applied to industry. In this paper, we review the application of ARIE and give its formal definition. Furthermore, we establish conditions for the existence of ARIE in the generalized configuration space, which is complex and nonideal. The relationship between the high-dimensional attractive region and the low-dimensional one is also discussed, which is helpful to make feasible and reliable manipulation strategies in the low-dimensional configuration space. The main contribution of this paper is the generalization of the concept of ARIE, which provides a theoretical foundation for applications including the high-precision manipulation with low-precision system. The experimental simulations on different kinds of complex manipulations show the effectiveness of the proposed method for industrial applications.