Adaptive Robot Design and Applications in Flexible Manufacturing Environments

Robots have played a very important role in the growing popular flexible manufacturing environments. However, state-of-art industrial robots with high accuracy are rather costly and static. Our works aims at providing a low-cost fast integrating platform with advanced middleware support to seamlessly integrate off-the-shelf or future robot sensors, robots, and actuators as well as industrial IT system. To support such approach, a component-based reconfigurable middleware system is designed. A system runtime service is employed to manage the dependence and whole lifecycle of realtime components by reasoning from component’s contract-based service description. A continues deployment mechanism is also designed The software architecture was implemented by so called – Hybrid component model. The evaluation shows that the ARFLEX system achieve the goal of enhance in accuracy, flexibility while provide good real-time characteristics.