What is Hierarchical Decomposition

This chapter provides a practical and intuitive way of cooperative task planning and execution for complex robotic systems using multiple robots in automated manufacturing applications. In large-scale complex robotic systems, because individual robots can autonomously execute their tasks, robotic activities are viewed as discrete event-driven asynchronous, concurrent processes. Further, since robotic activities are hierarchically defined, place/transition Petri nets can be properly used as specification tools on different levels of control abstraction. Net models representing inter-robot cooperation with synchronized interaction are presented to achieve distributed autonomous coordinated activities. An implementation of control software on hierarchical and distributed architecture is presented in an example multi-robot cell, where the higher level controller executes an activity-based global net model of task plan representing cooperative behaviors performed by the robots, and the parallel activities of the associated robots are synchronized without the coordinator through the transmission of requests and the reception of status.