Fy. Wang et Gn. Saridis, TASK TRANSLATION AND INTEGRATION SPECIFICATION IN INTELLIGENT MACHINES, IEEE transactions on robotics and automation, 9(3), 1993, pp. 257-271
Intelligent machines are defined to be hierarchically intelligent cont
rol systems composed of three levels: the organization level, the coor
dination level, and the execution level. This paper presents an analyt
ical model for the coordination level of intelligent machines, which,
together with the established mathematical formulation for the organiz
ation level and the well developed control theory for the execution le
vel, completes the first step toward a mathematical theory for intelli
gent machines. The framework of the coordination level is a tree struc
ture consisting of a dispatcher and a number of coordinators. A new ty
pe of transducers, Petri net transducers (PNTs), has been introduced t
o serve as the basic module in our analytical model. PNTs provide a fo
rmal description for the individual processes within the dispatcher an
d coordinators. The concurrence and conflict among these processes can
be represented by PNTs conveniently. Coordination structures are intr
oduced as a formalism for the specification of integration in the coor
dination level. The task precedence relationship in the coordination p
rocess is presented by the Petri nets derived from the coordination st
ructures. These Petri nets also provide us a formal approach of using
the concepts and analysis methods in the Petri net theory to investiga
te the properties of the coordination structures. A case study of mode
ling an intelligent assembly robotic system has been conducted for the
purpose of illustration.