Control components for Collaborative and Intelligent Automation Systems

Collaborative and intelligent automation systems need intelligent control systems. Some of this intelligence exist on a per-component basis in the form of vision, sensing, motion, and path planning algorithms. To fully take advantage of this intelligence, also the coordination of subsystems need to exhibit intelligence. While there exist middleware solutions that eases communication, development, and reuse of such subsystems, for example the Robot Operating System (ROS), good coordination also requires knowledge about how control is supposed to be performed, as well as expected behavior of the subsystems. This paper introduces lightweight components that wraps ROS2 nodes into composable control components from which an intelligent control system can be built. The ideas are implemented on a use case involving collaborative robots with on-line path planning, intelligent tools, and human operators.