Predictive Control and Estimation in Sensor-Based Robot Tasks

One of the major barriers to a more widespread adoption and use of robot manipulators, is the level of expertise that is required to program the robots. This is especially true in situations where the robot has to operate in an unstructured environment where there are large uncertainties present. For these scenarios the task to be preformed by the robot has to be completed in a sensor-based way, using the measurements received from sensors to reduce the uncertainy in the environment. This thesis combines estimation techniques with research that has been done in the field of constraint-based robot task specification for sensor-based tasks, with the aim being to provide a unified task specification language for both control and estimation.