4th I*PROMS Virtual International Conference, 1-14 July 2008, organized by FP6 I*PROMS Network of Excellence

Distributed Control Concept for a 6-DOF Reconfigurable Robot Arm

Dr. Thomas Strasser, Dr. Martijn Rooker, Gerhard Ebenhofer

Robotics and Adaptive Systems, PROFACTOR GmbH, Im Stadtgut A2, 4407 Steyr-Gleink, Austria

Abstract: Current trends such as shorter product lifecycles, reduced time-to-market and mass-customization require new paradigms and approaches for production lines and machines. In the long term, production and manufacturing com-panies will only be able to survive in the face of increasing globalisation if they can react flexibly and quickly to changing customer and market demands. New paradigms and approaches are waiting to fulfil these requirements, but their implementation requires completely new technologies.

Reconfiguration, both at machine (physical) and control technology (logical) level is a promising candidate to achieve the flexibility required by these paradigms by technical means. This makes a shift from centrally controlled, highly interlinked, and often tightly interlocked production systems to distributed, modular, collaborative components essential. This paper describes the distributed control concept for a 6-DOF reconfigurable robot arm as a demonstration platform for reconfigurable approaches at PROFACTOR.