A concept for distributed fuzzy control for cooperating manipulators

The use of robot systems with many degrees of freedom is essential to expand the field of potential applications. In this paper a distributed approach for executing task-level programs for cooperating manipulators or one arm systems with many degrees of freedom is presented. At task level, the movement of the objects to be manipulated is specified. The according manipulator motions are then calculated by assigning local intelligence to each joint. The local intelligence enables the joint agents to calculate in parallel their appropriate movements to make the end effector reach the desired position. During execution, each joint evaluates sensor data to compensate for execution errors, to react on unexpected obstacles and, if necessary, to provide the manipulator coordination. Therefore, a distributed fuzzy rule base has been developped. As this local evaluation may lead to non-optimal overall behavior of the manipulator, the joint agents seek global suboptimality by negotiating.