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The immediate purpose of the research on Intelligent Automata is to have an autonomous machine able to understand uncomplicated commands and to manipulate simple objects without human intervention. This thesis is concerned with the programming of a special output device of the present machine existing at Project MAC: an arm with eight degrees of freedom, made of our identical segments. Classical approaches through hill-climbing and optimal control techniques are discussed. However a new method is proposed to decompose the problem, in an eight-dimensional space, into a sequence of subproblems in spaces with fewer dimensions. Each subproblem can then be solved with simple analytical geometry. A simulation program, which applies this method, is able to propose several configurations for a given goal (expressed as a point in a five-dimensional space). |
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