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

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Date
1999-05Author
Fraile, Juan-Carlos
Paredis, Chris
Wang, Cheng-Hua
Khosla, Pradeep K.
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Show full item recordAbstract
This 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.