This paper deals with the concept of a control architecture for robot cells that enables plug'n'produce according to plug'n'play in the office world. To achieve this, a software module called "interconnector module" takes as input descriptions of devices and processes. These descriptions are then automatically evaluated in order to offer the user commands to use the functionality of the robot cell in its current setup. The evaluation consists of several steps that are processed in different sub-modules of the interconnector module. In this paper the concept of this interconnector module is introduced.

New technologies and processes enhance the need for direct human-robot-interaction, to fully exploit the potential of robots' accuracy and humans' adaptability. Therefore, the hazardous potential of the involved robot manipulator needs to be minimised. Limits must be set, so that only an acceptable severity of injury for the human will remain in case of an unintended contact between the robot and a human. Current standardisation for industrial robot systems does not sufficiently address the subject of close human-robot-cooperation, thereby restricting the implementation of the newest technology. The aim of the reported research is to demonstrate the possibilities to assess the safety performance of robot systems by robot-dummy impact evaluation. In this paper, methods from the automotive industry are investigated on their transferability to the situation in robotics. Anthropomorphic test devices, so called crash test dummies, that resemble the human's kinematic response in car crashes are analysed during a robot-dummy impact. A simulation setup with the dummy FAT ES-2 representing the operator and an industrial robot is realised within LS-DYNA to conduct impacts of the robot arm against the head and the chest. The resulting head injury index (HIC), the viscous criteria (VC) for the chest and the pubic symphysis peak force (PSPF) for the pelvis are discussed, showing their potential and limitations for the situation in robotics.

This paper presents the concept as well as first results of the EU-MOP ("elimination units for marine oil pollutions") project. The basic idea of this project is a swarm out of autonomous marine robots which are able to recover oil with the help of oil skimmers. In order to achieve a flexible and robust system, the swarm intelligence (SI) approach has been used as control paradigm for the EU-MOP robots. Within the SI approach interaction between the robots plays an important role for the performance of the whole multi robot system. Thus, three control approaches, all basing on SI, but with different levels of interaction, have been developed. Furthermore a method for the evaluation of swarms in comparison to single robot systems will be presented

In this contribution a robot assistant for handling and assembly tasks is presented. The main emphasis of PowerMate was to create a robot assistant that works together with a human worker that is conform to safety category 3 according to DIN ISO 954 and to use components suitable for industrial use, which leads to certain constrains on the possible control mechanisms. An overview of existing concepts of man-machine-cooperation is given. Different architectures for these kinds of robot assistants are discussed. A user-customizable motion control for PowerMate is presented. A description of the force-movement-calculations, the hardware and software architecture and the safety system of the robot assistant is given.

This paper presents the 'Realtime Framework', a package of software modules for building distributed real-time control systems in robotics and automation. The Realtime Framework covers the areas of client-server communication, control of program flow and modality through messaging and state machines, and low-level input/output. In addition, it contains a real-time utilities package and wrappers for operating system calls, which shield any operating system dependence from the application built on top of the Framework. Software design patterns were used to document solutions for recurring problems in control systems involving several related classes. The Realtime Framework is mostly aimed at increasing software modularity, portability and reusability, thereby reducing software development costs. This paper gives an overview of the major features of the Realtime Framework and summarizes practical experiences from applying it to a mobile robot control system.