Intelligent Containment Control With Double Constraints for Cloud-Based Collaborative Manufacturing

Modern manufacturing process is commonly composed of multiple automated devices working together efficiently. Cloud-based manufacturing aims to achieve better efficiency by allowing the collaborative manufacturing across a group of automated robots. Cooperations between multiple robots can accomplish more complicated tasks that is beyond the capability of any individual one. However, it is of critical importance to control robots with different capabilities to work in harmony while ensuring safety and reliability during this process. In this paper, a double constrained containment mechanism is proposed to dispatch heterogeneous robots in a distributed containment control framework for smart manufacturing. Following a three-layer control framework, a cloud decision-making center is designed to realize the cloud-based collaborative manufacturing, which is more cost-effective than other commonly used containment mechanisms that only rely on information exchange among leader-robots. A projection-based containment control scheme is developed, which not only consider nonlinearities induced by position constraints and velocity constraints, but also can tackle dynamically changing communication topologies with uncertain communication delay, to efficiently navigate all follower-robots into a safe working zone formed by leaders. A theoretical stability analysis is conducted to prove the proposed mechanism can ensure all followers enter the target area while their positions and velocities remaining in the corresponding constraint sets. Experiment evaluation results under three application scenarios demonstrate the advantage of our method that can offer a more practical solution to other existing multi-robot containment control for cloud-based smart manufacturing, in considering both position and velocity constraints combined with switching topologies and communication delays.