IMEDA

The Temple of Hephaestus

The VULCAN project

A current problem in mechatronics is control clustering, i.e. creating synergies among mechatronic nodes, which, by exchanging messages that trigger their individual nodal behaviours, exhibit an emergent behaviour as a whole.

This means that independent mechatronic devices communicate with peer devices at the level of logic, in order to form a virtual union of their logic instead of forcing an actual union through attachment of their physical interfaces.

This approach is the equivalent of individuals being bound together by their concord, rather than throught chains and shackles around their ankles. In this fashion, each node will behave more like an autonomous entity within a society, rather than as a part within a machine. From a control standpoint the aforementioned is split into two domains: the domain of defining the individual behaviour and the domain of effecting the emergent behaviour of the swarm/cluster through synergy of the nodes.

There is merit in further making this synergy flexible through behavioural parametrisation of the whole and the part, where the behaviour of the whole will emerge as a result of the individual actions of its parts, while the individual acts will be determined by environmental sensing and peer interaction on the basis of collective and individual rules that are defined parametrically.

In previous research conducted by the manufacturing systems integration research institute, the component based paradigm was theoretically and technologically examined as an instrument to achieving flexible control clusters, highlighting though a number of limitations.

The limitations of component based paradigm were that it limited its scope to discrete time event based control, collision domain wired networks, parametrisation of logic interlocks affecting only the emergent behaviour of otherwise fixed mechatronic modules, while the platform chosen for proof of concept was proprietary, closed and severely underpowered from a computational and internetworking perspective.

Virtually Unified Logic for Controlling Automation Networks (VULCAN) seeks to rectify these by proposing a new control theory based on modified Finite State Machines (FSM) that instead of offering event-driven discrete control will offer metabola-driven continuous control.

Finite Stasis Metabola Machines (FSM2) will allow, apart from parametrisation of emergent behaviour, the parametrisation of behaviour at a per node level as well. The proposed FSM2 theory will permit to design, simulate and parametrise the behaviour of clusters of mechatronic nodes.

Embodied, through an appropriate algorithm, in software, it will run on nodes comprising of open standards hardware and software offering flexible automation solutions for agile organisations.