Implementation of Distributed Control Architecture for Multiple Robot Systems Using Petri Nets
Gen’ichi Yasuda · InTech eBooks · 2012
Because of the generality of the robot’s physical structure, control and reprogrammability, it is expected that more and more robots will be introduced into industry to automate various operations. This flexibility can be exploited if the robot control system can be programmed easily. Anyway, it is quite obvious that a single robot cannot perform effective tasks in an industrial environment, unless it is provided with some additional equipment. For example, in building a component, two robots are required to cooperate, one holding some part while the other attaches some other part to it. In other tasks, robots may pursue different goals, making sure that they both don’t attempt to use the same resource at the same time. Such synchronization and coordination can only be achieved by getting the robots to talk to each other or to some supervising agent. However, for large-scaled and complicated manufacturing systems, from the viewpoint of cost-performance and reliability appropriate representation and analysis methods of the control system have not sufficiently been established [1]. The lack of adequate programming tools for multiple robots make some tasks impossible to be performed. In other cases, since the control requirements are diversified and often changed, the cost of programming may be a significant fraction of the total cost of an application. Due to these reasons, the development of an effective programming method to integrate a system which includes various robots and other devices that cooperate in the same task is urgently required [2].