Systems approach to robotics and automation

Practical experiences in the development of modern robot control systems showed that the most successful components developed were those that were designed to work in comprehensive automation systems. These components were forced to be implemented in a greater framework and thus to adhere to standards and to standardized interfaces in order to facilitate integration and test of the final system. Although it was suspected in the beginning that system constraints in the form of architectural design guides imposed on the different parts of the realization might hamper the creativity of the developers, it was found that just the opposite was the case. After a training phase the developers managed to “think globally, but act locally”, so that e.g. the development, the integration and the tests of a multirobot system for space-applications, a robot-simulation system, a flexible assembly-workcell and a new virtual-reality-system could be conducted in a coherent manner in a very short time