A COMPUTER NETWORK-BASED CONTROL ARCHITECTURE FOR AUTONOMOUS DISTRIBUTED MULTIROBOT SYSTEMS

This paper presents the specification and implementation procedure usi ng a microcomputer network based autonomous distributed control archit ecture for industrial multirobot systems. The procedure is based on th e concept of data flow network controlled by communicating sequential processes to perform coordinated tasks. Robots and other computerized industrial devices such as conveyors and manufacturing machines are de fined as object-oriented Petri nets. A modular and hierarchical approa ch is adopted to define a set of Petri net type diagrams which represe nt concurrent activities of control processes for such devices. Asynch ronous and synchronous interactions are modelled by places and transit ions, respectively, in global process interaction nets. The control so ftware is implemented on a computer network using Inmos transputers wi th true parallel processing and message passing primitives efficiently handled in hardware. Petri net based models are directly and efficien tly transformed to corresponding codes in occam, the high level parall el. programming language defined for the transputer.