A Mobile Agent-Based Framework for Flexible Control of Multi-Robotic Systems

Abstract

Modern manufacturing systems are increasingly becoming highly dynamic due to rapid changes in market and government regulations, as well as the integration of emerging technologies. To address the challenges of uncertainty, a flexible platform is critically needed for developing a new generation of manufacturing systems. This paper presents a mobile agent-based framework that supports dynamic deployment of control algorithms and operations in multi-robotic systems. The framework is based on a mobile agent system called Mobile-C. It uses Ch, an interpretive C/C++ environment, for robot programming. Since Ch has been ported to most existing computer platforms, the framework can control robots that work in different operating systems. Using a robot package in Ch as a middleware, control programs are portable to heterogeneous robots and associated mechatronic devices. The presented framework has been implemented and validated in an experimental robotic cell that consists of a Puma 560, an IBM 7575, and a conveyor system. The results show that the mobile agent approach can effectively deploy and execute new control algorithms and operations as mobile agents on any sub-system in a network.