Design and implementation of a modular fault tolerant robot control concept

There are many products in the automotive or white good industry which are manufactured in a widely distributed network of several production cells in which robots play a dominating role. Faults during automatic production in the plants can result in considerable losses of the product quality or additional production costs e.g. due to maintenance or standstill periods. Moreover, faults in the robot environment of a cell can considerably endanger human health. Thus, around this field of application a very important issue will be the overall multi-sensoric supervision and control of the complete process to achieve goals of higher accuracy and more efficiency as well as to guarantee safety even in the case of component malfunctions or faults of the human operator.