Distributed Agent Programming in the Architecture For Agile Assembly

The goal of the Architecture for Agile Assembly (AAA) is to enable rapid deployment and reconfiguration of automated assembly systems through the use of cooperating, modular, and robust robotic agents. The programs for these agents operate in a completely distributed fashion and must efficiently specify precision cooperative behavior. To allow this, the structure of agent programs is carefully designed to enable the automatic encapsulation of the information necessary for execution when a program is down-loaded to a physical agent. The programming model supports the compact specification and robust execution of potentially complex and fragile cooperative behaviors by making use of ordered sets of control strategies which allow a real-time hybrid control system to automatically sequence their execution. This abstraction allows the agent program to describe the high-level semantic behavior of the agent while relying on a set of formally correct control strategies to properly execute and sequence the necessary continuous behaviors.