Hierarchical and distributed implementation of synchronization and coordination for discrete event multiple robot systems

Since in the large and complex robotic systems such as multiple robot systems, the real robot controllers are spatially distributed according to their physical structure, it is desirable to realize the hierarchical and distributed control with a suitable parallel processing architecture. Hierarchical Petri net modeling is seemingly well suited for structured and predictable environments such as robotic manufacturing systems. The paper presents a discrete event net based distributed control architecture for multiple robot coordination. According to the parallelism among the robotic tasks in the system, the advantage of the parallel and distributed architecture of the control system will be taken to reach the high performance control capabilities.