Autonomous Agents in Cellular Manufacturing

Industrial and Mobile Robot Collision-Free Motion Planning Using Fuzzy Logic Algorithms

“…The purpose is to make better use of low-level control capabilities in performing real-time operations. A number of different architectures for autonomous robot navigation have been proposed in the last twenty years (Latombe, 1991;Fugimura, 1991;Tzafestas, 1999). These include hierarchical architectures that partition the robot's functionalities into high-level (model and plan) and low-level (sense and execute) layers; behaviour -based architectures that achieve complex behaviour by combining several simple behaviourproducing units; and hybrid architectures that combine a layered organization with a behaviour-based decomposition of the execution layer (see e.g., (Izumi & Watanabe, 2000;Watanabe et al, 1996;Topalov & Tzafestas, 2001;Watanabe et al, 2005;Lozano-Perez, 1983;Khatib, 1986;Ratering & Gini, 1995;Erdmann & Lozano-Perez, 1987;Griswold & Elan, 1990;Gil de Lamadrid & Gini, 1990;Fibry, 1987;Gat, 1991;Sugeno & Nishida, 1985;Yen & Pflunger, 1992)).…”

“…Motion planning is a primary task in robot operation, where the objective is to determine collision-free paths for a robot that works in an environment that contains some moving obstacles (Latombe, 1991;Fugimura, 1991;Tzafestas, 1999). A moving obstacle may be a rigid object, or an object with joints such as an industrial manipulator.…”

A Study of Self-Organization in a Production Environment

“…For all those purposes, the system has to self-organize in order to respond to the inputs while meeting the operational constraints involved. Selforganization in a distributed environment is achieved through the use of fairly simple local, adaptive behavioral rules that have to be chosen so as to optimize if possible the overall system's operationality, as defined by a set of objectives and/or constraints [6,7,8].…”