Data/knowledge representation of modular robot and its working environment

Abstract

This paper reports a work towards automating the design of a modular robot in the manufacturing environment. As the first as well as the most important step, a data model or data representation of all the design related information needs to be developed. This paper discusses the data representation of information needed for the computer to automatically generate a suitable modular robot configuration. A modular robot is supposed to work in a manufacturing assembly environment. Therefore, the collection of the information needed starts from such an environment. The information is further derived based on a proposed architecture of the computer-aided system for generating a modular robot configuration, which is based on two theories, i.e., cased-based reasoning and function-behaviour-structure (FBS). As a consequence, an integrated data representation of both modular robot and its environment is proposed and discussed in this paper. The integrated data representation also implies that function, behaviour and structure are related to a modular robot (as well as modular joint) are represented in the computer. EXPRESS data modelling language is used to complete the modelling work, and is found necessary for complex systems. A case study has been provided to show the capability of the developed data representations.