Embodied intelligence to turn evolvable assembly system reality

Abstract

Evolvable Assembly Systems may successfully resolve industry's problems with low volume/high change productions; thanks to Embodied Intelligence, systems can play an active role in the engineering procedure. Modules do not only consist of their physical body including small local controllers, but also represent themselves in Virtual Reality. Interacting with each other, they Self-Organize to fulfill the everchanging production requirements. Systems become user-friendly, distributed and more autonomous. This article concretizes the required control solution by detailing the different controlrelated issues and tasks at hand. Examples of information needed for computerreadable specifications of parts, processes and system modules are given. A navigator system is proposed to transform resource-independent assembly instructions into layout-specific executables. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.