Assembly and task planning using Petri nets: a survey

The automatic synthesis of a plan to perform a robotized assembly task from a high-level description of the product to be assembled is a difficult issue which involves assembly planning and task planning. This paper summarizes the problems that an autonomous robotic assembly system must tackle both regarding assembly planning and task planning and reviews the approaches that use Petri nets as a formalism to develop the corresponding planners. The need for integration of both assembly and task planning is made evident, and approaches covering that are described.