Coevolution of physical configuration and control strategy on self-reconfigurable flexible transfer system

This paper describes an extension of the flexible transfer system (FTS) with self-reconfigurability of the physical modular configuration. The FTS is a two-dimensional transfer system composed of many modules which transfer a pallet to the neighboring module. A decentralized control which we previously have proposed can generate feasible transfer paths with the adaptability to environmental changes, but the fixed configuration of modules causes the limitation of the adaptability. Therefore, this paper proposes a self-reconfigurable flexible transfer system (SRFTS) and the module reconfiguration method, and addresses the issue of the coevolution of the physical configuration and the control strategy. The self-reconfigurability overcomes the drawback in the conventional FTS, and improves the transfer performance and the fault tolerance. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated by numerical simulations.