A PARALLEL DISTRIBUTED CONTROL ARCHITECTURE FOR MULTIPLE ROBOT SYSTEMS USING A NETWORK OF MICROCOMPUTERS

This paper presents the design and implementation of a parallel distri buted control architecture for industrial multiple robot systems. The design methodology is based on a concept of discrete states and action s, and a robotic task is represented as a sequence of primitive action s. For cooperative or exclusive tasks at the synchronous level of mult iple robot systems, Petri net representation is applied, and discrete event-driven control is implemented as a data flow network of concurre nt processes communicating with each other. Implementation of multipro cessing control on a microcomputer and a network of microcomputers is discussed.