Modeling and Simulation of Discrete Event Robotic Systems Using Extended Petri Nets

Abstract

This chapter deals with modeling, simulation, and implementation problems encountered in robotic manufacturing control systems. Extended Petri nets are adopted as a prototyping tool for expressing real-time control of robotic systems and a systematic method based on hierarchical Petri nets is described for their direct implementation. A coordination mechanism is introduced to coordinate the event activities of the distributed machine controllers through friability tests of shared global transitions. The proposed prototyping method allows a direct coding of the inter-task cooperation by robots and intelligent machines from the conceptual Petri net specification, so that it increases the traceability and the understanding of the control flow of a parallel application specified by a net model. This approach can be integrated with off-the-shelf real-time executives. Control software using multithreaded programming is demonstrated to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.