A parallel distributed control architecture for multiple robot systems using a network of microcomputers

This paper presents the design and implementation of a parallel distributed control architecture for industrial multiple robot systems. The design methodology is based on a concept of discrete states and actions, and a robotic task is represented as a sequence of primitive actions. For cooperative or exclusive tasks at the synchronous level of multiple robot systems, Petri net representation is applied, and discrete event-driven control is implemented as a data flow network of concurrent processes communicating with each other. Implementation of multiprocessing control on a microcomputer and a network of microcomputers is discussed.