Distributed autonomous control of modular robot systems using parallel programming

This paper describes the design and implementation of a modular distributed architecture for distributed autonomous control of modular robot systems using parallel programming in industrial robotic manufacturing applications. The control system has an overall hierarchical structure, and parallel structure in its lower levels. The lower levels are composed of several autonomous units; each unit is equipped with a microprocessor-based controller, and has its own control functions with sensors, actuators, and communication interfaces as an intelligent autonomous sensing and actuating device. Operations of these autonomous actuators are integrated through a communication network of serial bus type. An autonomous actuator is a basic unit for distributed motion control of a robotic mechanism. Because of the hardware and software modularity, they have the advantages such as reduction of system costs, application flexibility, system reliability, and system extensibility. A microcontroller-based flexible and extensible architecture is proposed, and the features of distributed microcontroller implementation are discussed. For a two degrees of freedom robotic mechanism, a mobile robot with two coaxial independently driving wheels, position and velocity control algorithms to follow a planned path cooperatively are implemented, and the performance of the proposed architecture is experimentally evaluated.