Performance analysis of a dual robot system using a geometric concurrency model

Abstract

In the paper we consider a manufacturing cell in which two robots cyclically move along well-defined paths of the workspace area. The concurrent motion of the robots in the common workspace must comply with the physical motion constraints. This implies a necessity of delays which are difficult to predict because the robots progress independently without synchronisation for variable interval of times. Our objective is to develop a technique to formally analyse concurrent behaviour of the robots. In order to model the execution behaviour of the system we use a geometric concurrency model that represents synchronisation constraints in concurrent movement of the robots by the spatial arrangement of line segments in a two dimensional real coordinate system. The model is mapped next to a Diophantine equation and its solution applied in a numeric algorithm that determines the steady state of the system, i.e. the sequence and timing of global states the system passes through during its execution.

This research was supported by KBN grant Design of Intelligent Robotics Systems Based on Knowledge Engineering