Robotic workcell control based on a societal architecture

Robot techniques appear to have made little impact on applications areas involving part assembly. This is mainly due to a lack of flexibility and consequent problems of cost justification, particularly where there are multiple products and short production runs. Ways of increasing flexibility include the reduction of fixturing by using more than one robot on an assembly task, the provision of enhanced sensing capabilities by using multiple sensors, and the use of the sensory system to provide information for an error correction and detection facility. A complex system with these facilities places particular emphasis on the requirement to integrate a set of subsystems. This integration is difficult to achieve using conventional methods of computer control. To overcome these problems a vertically integrated architecture has been developed in which the integration concepts are carried through from the algorithms to a parallel processing implementation. The approach is based upon the asynchronous coordinated action of many agents and gives rise to the concept of a societal architecture-a society of agents. The structure of the agents and the manner in which information is passed between them is heavily influenced by the need to support a large number of simple agents and by the need to achieve real time operation. This latter can be achieved by an architecture, Vortex, which is based on the concept of dynamic shared data