Sensor‐referenced multiple robot cooperation for material handling

In this paper, a new cooperation control scheme for multiple robot material handling is presented. First, the event‐based planning and control method is introduced, which lays down the foundation for sensor‐referenced cooperation of multiple robot systems. The key step is the development of event‐based action reference. Based on the real‐time sensory information, the event‐based action reference drives the system to achieve the best possible coordination. The event‐based cooperation control scheme can easily be implemented in a distributed computer system. A real‐time control and computing architecture is proposed to implement this scheme in a parallel computation. The new multiple robot cooperation scheme has been experimentally implemented and tested on two 6‐DOF PUMA 560 robots. The experimental results have demonstrated the advantages of the scheme.