Robot assembly planning using contract nets

Abstract

In an environment with plural robots, an assembly plan may be changed according to the constraints or abilities of the manipulator which executes the task. For an assembly task composed of subassemblies which can be executed at the same time, the assembly plan depends on the constraints of the manipulator. This paper describes an approach to an assembly planning system using contract net protocols. The contract nets are applied between part agents and robot agents which have a little automatic faculty. An assembly plan is generated based on searching an AND/OR graph for a given product using heuristic estimation.