Design of robotized cells: a multi agent approach

Robotics have benefited from distributed artificial intelligence and especially multi-agent systems. While the application of multi-agent systems to mobile robots are extremely popular, other fields of robotics have not been so well explored. In this paper, we present a multi-agent approach to design robotized cells. The design of robotized cells requires choosing a large number of parameters. We have chosen to associate each parameter with an agent possessing its own functionalities of perception, communication and action. The presented method has been successfully applied to an industrial measuring cell using a special six revolution jointed manipulator to solve various problems of the manipulator: the inverse kinematics, the kinematic redundancy used to measure spots in an environment with obstacles, the placement and the design. Algorithms have been developed in C++ and have been tested on Robcad, a CAD system from Tecnomatix Company, partner of this project.