A Holonic Control System Design for a Human & Industrial Robot Cooperative Workcell

Abstract

As a result of the rapid development in industrial robot technology, a close safe cooperation with the human worker became quite possible. Accordingly an appropriate control system must exist to provide an intelligent tool for their information interaction. Therefore this paper is proposing a novel implementation model for a holonic control system solution. The ultimate goal of the proposed holonic control system is to adeptly manage the information exchange between an industrial robot in cooperation with a human worker in a production workcell. The novelty in the proposed holonic solution is that it merges the advantages of two well-known control architectures. The two architectures are IEC 61499 standard and autonomous reactive agent model. IEC 61499 has been used to implement the holon physical component, to handle the physical input/output (I/O) from/to an industrial robot or a human worker. Simultaneously autonomous reactive agent technology has been used to implement the holon communication component, to handle the information exchange between an industrial robot holon and a worker holon.