An IEC 61499 distributed control concept for reconfigurable robots

Abstract

Current trends such as shorter product lifecycles, reduced time-to-market and mass-customisation require new paradigms and approaches for production lines and machines. In the long term, production and manufacturing companies will only be able to survive in the face of increasing globalisation if they can react flexibly and quickly to changing customer and market demands. New paradigms and approaches are waiting to fulfil these requirements, but their implementation requires completely new technologies. Reconfiguration, both at machine (physical) and control technology (logical) level is a promising candidate to achieve the flexibility required by these paradigms by technical means. This makes a shift from centrally controlled, highly interlinked, and often tightly interlocked production systems to distributed, modular, collaborative components essential. This paper describes the distributed control concept for a 6-DOF reconfigurable robot arm based on the IEC 61499 reference model as a demonstration platform for reconfigurable approaches.