This is the first year of a two-year continuing award in the joint ENG/CISE research thrust in Intelligent Material Handling Systems. This research effort involves simulation, control, and implementation of an experimental integrated material handling systems. The following research issues, felt to be critical to the success of intelligent material handling systems, are studied: Distributed software architecture using a variety of expert software packages, with robust communication protocols; Object-oriented software for simulation of material handling systems at various levels of abstraction; Planning of safe motion and part acquisition using a variety of sensing methods; Real-time sensor processing algorithms for intelligent control of operations; Methods for dealing with uncertainty due to a variety of sources; Testing and validation of concepts in two "microfactories;" and Rapid prototyping of custom end-effectors and fixtures to handle particular parts. The research involves integration of a number of specialist programs, running on a variety of processors, using a versatile interface protocol. The specialist include a package for handler modeling and motion simulation and control, two real-time multiprocessors for control and sensor processing, a vision package, a mechanical design package, and an NC machine code generator. These systems will communicate via the CPU interprocess communication protocol, which has been successfully demonstrated with many of the systems. In addition, the BLOCS object-oriented simulation package, which was developed at Berkeley, will be used to model the actual system at several levels and to validate and improve the design in terms of information flow, material flow, and error tolerance. Eventually, BLOCS will perform some high-level monitoring and control of the actual material handling systems.
