The design of an assembly cell task supervisor

To increase task flexibility in a robotic assembly environment, a hierarchical planning and execution system is being developed which will map user-specified, three-dimensional part assembly tasks into various target robotic workcells, and execute these tasks efficiently using manipulators and sensors available in the workcell. One level of this hierarchy, the supervisor, is responsible for assigning subtasks of a system-generated task plan to a set of task specific specialists, and online coordination of the activity of these specialists to accomplish the user-specified assembly. The design of the supervisor is broken down into five major functional blocks: resource management; concurrency detection; task scheduling; error recovery; and interprocess communication. Using concepts from operating systems, the design of each of these supervisor blocks is examined