Abstruct -This paper describes what automatic generation control (AGC) might be expected to do, and what may not be possible or expedient for it to do. The purposes and objectives of AGC are limited by physical elements involved in the process and, hence, the relevant characteristics of these elements are described. For reasons given in this paper, it is desired that AGC act slowly and deliberately over tens of seconds or a few minutes. From a perspective of utility operations, there is no particular economic or control purpose served by speeding up the AGC action.By this Task Force paper, the System Control Subcommittee is providing a resource to the power engineering community to help guide research into topics related to AGC.
Mobile multirobot systems play an increasing role in many disciplines. Their capabilities can be used, e.g., to transport workpieces in industrial applications or to support operational forces in search and rescue scenarios, among many others. Depending on the respective application, the hardware design and accompanying software of mobile robots are of various forms, especially for integrating different sensors and actuators. Concerning this design, robots of one system compared to each other can be classified to exclusively be either homogeneous or heterogeneous, both resulting in different system properties. While homogeneously configured systems are known to be robust against failures through redundancy but are highly specialized for specific use cases, heterogeneously designed systems can be used for a broad range of applications but suffer from their specialization, i.e., they can only hardly compensate for the failure of one specialist. Up to now, there has been no known approach aiming to unify the benefits of both these types of system. In this paper, we present our approach to filling this gap by introducing a reference architecture for mobile robots that defines the interplay of all necessary technologies for achieving this goal. We introduce the class of robot systems implementing this architecture as multipotent systems that bring together the benefits of both system classes, enabling homogeneously designed robots to become heterogeneous specialists at runtime. When many of these robots work together, we call the structure of this cooperation an ensemble. To achieve multipotent ensembles, we also integrate reconfigurable and self-descriptive hardware (i.e., sensors and actuators) in this architecture, which can be freely combined to change the capabilities of robots at runtime. Because typically a high degree of autonomy in such systems is a prerequisite for their practical usage, we also present the integration of necessary mechanisms and algorithms for achieving the systems’ multipotency. We already achieved the first results with robots implementing our approach of multipotent systems in real-world experiments as well as in a simulation environment, which we present in this paper.
Multi-agent systems can be a viable choice for realizing self-organizing systems consisting of reconfigurable software components. We present a real-world system consisting of heterogeneous air and ground robots whose behavior and coordination is orchestrated by a MAS in a decentralized manner. The system is able to cooperatively transport largescale measuring equipment and is used for environmental observation, such as in-situ measuring of temperature.
During the last two decades, software development has evolved continuously into an engineering discipline with systematic use of methods and tools to model and implement software. For example, object-oriented analysis and design is structuring software models according to real-life objects of the problem domain and their relations. However, the industrial robotics domain is still dominated by old-style, imperative robot programming languages, making software development difficult and expensive. For this reason, we introduce the object-oriented Robotics Application Programming Interface (Robotics API) for developing software for industrial robotic applications. The Robotics API offers an abstract, extensible domain model and provides common functionality, which can be easily used by application developers. The advantages of the Robotics API are illustrated with an application example.
Recently, the need for safe human-robotinteraction has become increasingly important, and with it the requirement to reliably detect persons in the workspace of a robot. Capacitive sensors mounted to the robot structure can be used to measure the presence of conductive objects and, hence, allow the detection of persons. However, various objects in the workspace can influence capacitive sensor measurements. Thus, we propose to record an environment model containing the expected sensor values for relevant robot poses. Using this model, distance estimation and real-time reaction can be performed even in the presence of additional conductive objects in the workspace. A demonstration of our approach was shown at the Hannover Messe 2015.
Today, most industrial robots are interfaced using text-based programming languages. These languages offer the possibility to declare robotic-specific data types, to specify simple motions, and to interact with tools and sensors via I/O operations. While tailored to the underlying robot controller, they usually only offer a fixed and controller-specific set of possible instructions. The specification of complex motions, the synchronization of cooperating robots and the advanced use of sensors is often very difficult or not even feasible. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a generic and extensible interface for industrial robots, the Realtime Primitives Interface, as part of a larger software architecture. It allows a flexible specification of complex control instructions and can facilitate the development of sustainable robot controllers. The advantages of this approach are illustrated with several examples.
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