Development and implementation of a real-time open-architecture control system for industrial robot systems

This paper presents a real-time open-architecture control system (ROACS) which has been developed for flexible manipulation of industrial robots. Flexible manipulation refers to robot manipulation that handles tasks with uncertainties; hence, decision-making based on feedback data is essential in realtime operation. A real-time open-architecture control system with the capacity of parallel processing of realtime events, extraction of information from realtime data, and intelligent decision-making, is developed. The entire system consists of a real-time subsystem which manages robot hardware and executes path planning and data processing, and an intelligent subsystem which performs intelligent decision-making and feedback task control. In the context of intelligent task control, information extraction, fuzzy-logic-based interpretation and decision-making, and a novel design of associated real-time robot task language (RTTL) are developed. The conflicts between high bandwidth requirements for real-time services and the undeterministic time length for intelligent decision-making are managed in a cooperative real-time intelligent system model. Client– server architecture is found quite suitable for implementation of the system. The entire system has been successfully developed, implemented, and demonstrated for a robotic salmon slicing task which requires online determination of the backbone position. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.