Implementation of an event-based low-level control for mobile robots

Abstract

Mobile robots get increasingly important in the implementation of adaptive production systems. In order to gain the most benefit from mobile robots they need at the one hand efficiently cooperate with the overall production system and on the other hand provide their functionality (e.g., pick and place of parts) fast and with a high precision. Semantic enhanced multi-agent systems have proven to serve well for the first task, especially in heterogeneous environments. However, they lack when applied to directly control automation equipment. In order to overcome this limitation this work presents an underlying low-level control architecture that takes over the task of handling the mobile robots equipment (e.g., arm). This approach relives at first the agent system and at second improves the overall system operation. By a flexible generic design we achieve that our implementation can handle different arm configurations and abstract it in form of a common interface for the upper level agent.