Two Arms Are Faster Than One

Two basic approaches to incorporate concurrent movements of multiple robot arms for speeding up a given task are iden tified. The first approach is based on defining a high-level motion primitive that encapsulates two properly synchronized operations into one step. The second approach is based on refining (decomposing) and pipelining robot operations. Both approaches are exemplified by a special pick-and-place task formulated as the Tower-of-Hanoi problem. It is shown that, by using no more than three robotic arms, an exponential speed-up in terms of time steps can be achieved. Therefore, when properly arranged, multiple arms can be extremely cost effective in certain applications.