Agent-Based Planning and Control of a Multi-Manipulator Assembly System

This paper was presented at the 1999 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Detroit, MI, May 10-15. The definitive paper can be found at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ (DOI: 10.1109/ROBOT.1999.772528). © IEEEThis paper presents a distributed planning and control architecture for autonomous Multi-Manipulator Systems (MMS). The control architecture is implemented using an agent-based approach. A team of distributed and autonomous agents is deployed to model the flexible assembly system in such a way that the agents negotiate, collaborate, and cooperate to achieve the goals of assembly tasks. The main focus of this paper is on assembly task allocation and assembly task execution. We describe the agent models and communication mechanism, and explain how they handle complex interactions among agents. A distributed trajectory planning approach based on artificial potential fields is also presented. Experimental results show that our multi-agent planning and control framework is suitable for flexible robotic assembly tasks. Our approach addresses the issues of flexibility, scalability, reconfigurability, and fault-tolerance. We anticipate that the same approach can be applied to other flexible manufacturing environments.Institute for Complex Engineered Systems at Carnegie Mellon UniversityResearch Program TAP 95-0092 of the “Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT)” of the Spanish Government, by DARPA under contract ONR #N00014- 96-1-085