An intelligent automated robotic assembly system consists of several subsystems capable of providing dynamic interactions with the environment in order to accomplish a task properly. These subsystems perform various functions like data gathering, decision making, and task execution. Although a great deal of work has been done on individual subsystems, more attention must be given to the way how these subsystems are integrated so as to achieve the high efficiency of automated production. We propose a cooperative multi-agent model of a shop floor control system architecture of robotic assembly automation and extend this model to all automated production system. Based on this model, we develop a control kernel named TOFAK (task oriented flexible automation kernel) to support users to easily implement any shop floor control system. The by-product is to allow system designers to easily expand an existing system or to integrate several automation systems which are all controlled by TOFAK.

How to perform control and achieve stability of robotic manipulators with joint flexibility forms a problem of profound practical and theoretical interest. This paper is to investigate and to solve this problem without strict assumption on the joint stiffness. Here, an adaptive control scheme of a flexible-joint manipulator, which takes into account its full nonlinear dynamics, is presented. Without the knowledge of the system model, the developed control lams, requiring only the position and velocity information of the actuators and links, is capable of driving the link tracking errors asymptotically to zero, while maintaining the uniform boundedness of all signals in the closed-loop system. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control law, an example of a two-link flexible-joint manipulator is constructed and a number of computer simulations are performed which show quite satisfactory results.

As has been realized, the flexible-link manipulators have attracted more and more attention from robot control theorists and/or robot users because of its various potential advantages. But since the control degree-of-freedom is much less than that of the system, many control strategies which succeed in the conventional rigid robot control cannot be directly used in the flexible robot control problems. In this paper, a nonlinear control scheme has been proposed as a solution to these control problems. In particular, to cope with the existing model uncertainty, an adaptive version of this nonlinear control law has been proposed. Stability proof of the overall closed-loop system is then given via Lyapunov analysis. In addition, extensive experimental results are also provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of nonlinear adaptive hybrid control of constrained robots with flexible links. According to the physical properties of a flexible manipulator, a two time-scale approach, namely singular perturbation approach, is further utilized for thorough analysis and general controller design. It is shown that asymptotic motion tracking can be effectively achieved, whereas the force regulation errors can be made arbitrarily small. For demonstration of the controller performance, experiments of a two-link flexible manipulator were performed for the proposed controller and satisfactory results observed.

Because the control DOF (Degree of Freedom) is much less than the motion DOF when a flexible manipulator is commanded to track a desired trajectory, many control strategies that succeed in conventional rigid-robot control cannot be directly applied to solve the flexible robot control problem. In this work, an adaptive variable structure scheme has been proposed to solve such a problem. The full nonlinear dynamics of the whole system are all taken into account for the control design. To alleviate the chattering phenomenon commonly seen in variable structure type of control, a saturation type adaptive scheme has also been proposed. For verification of the effectiveness of the proposed controller, a two-link flexible manipulator is built up and the promise of the controller is experimentally demonstrated.

This work focuses on the control of flexible manipulators. Due to the complicated dynamics of a flexible manipulator, which does not satisfy the so-called "matching condition" many control strategies which succeed in conventional rigid robot control cannot be directly used in flexible robot control problems. In this work, a generalized computed torque control scheme has been proposed to solve this kind of control problem. Furthermore, to cope with the model uncertainty, an adaptive control scheme has also been proposed. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.>