Documents our efforts to develop a scalable low-cost and high-performance network infrastructure for a novel distributed automation system-minifactory. The resulting communication system (AAA-Net) relies on a suite of low-latency protocols carried by a commercial 100 Mb Fast Ethernet network. In addition to documenting the operation of this network system and its associated protocols we offer a brief comparison to the currently available commercial field network systems, and present experimental verification of the performance delivered by AAA-Net under typical and extreme operating conditions.

We document our initial efforts to instantiate visually-guided cooperative behaviors between robotic agents in the minifactory environment. The minifactory incorporates high-precision, 2-DOF robotic agents to perform micron-level precision 4-DOF assembly tasks. Here we utilize two minifactory agents to perform visual servoing. We present a detailed description of the control and communication systems used to coordinate the agents. To provide a suitable communications infrastructure, we describe the development of a new interagent communication system which uses low-latency protocols carried by a commercial 100 Mb Ethernet network. Finally, we conclude by presenting experimental results front our first coordinated multi-agent task, the visually guided positioning of a small medical device.