Assembly Robotics Group, Edinburgh University

The chosen experimental domain to test this hybrid architecture was the SOMASS puzzle, a kind of simple 3D jigsaw puzzle based on seven bent bricks which could be assembled into a cube. This had been invented by the mathematician Piet Hin, allegedly during a boring lecture by Heisenber. He called it the "SOMA puzzle". It became a popular puzzle and is available at all good puzzle shops. The first version of the SOMASS (SOMa ASSembly) system (1985) used no sensors, dealing with uncertainty by using compliant motions, and was capable of planning and performing the assembly of a SOMA cube in dozens of of different ways. This was generalised to handle the assembly of any shape from these parts, and from instances of these parts of any size, and by 1990 behaviour-based uncalibrated vision-guided part aquisition had been developed, which did not need to know camera parameters or position, or robot kinematics.