Flexible Agent-Based Robotic Assembly Cell

This paper describes a flexible, coherent framework for organizing and operating a robotic assembly cell that has multiple robots. This framework, which is based on the concept of an agent as understood in the field of multiagent systems, supports the task-level programming and scheduling of assembly operations. In this framework, we decompose an assembly operation into two distinct phases: part fetching and part assembling. The agents of the cell correspond to these two assembly phases plus an agent to manage the shared physical space of the cell and an agent to properly schedule the assembly operations. The simulations and experiments with this framework are presented and discussed.