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In co-operation with an Austrian small sized company, the Institute for Handling Devices and Robotics at the Vienna University of Technology started a project with the goal to reduce the time necessary for planning, programming and set-up of robot equipped manufacturing cells. In this contribution a modular, object-oriented control system for robotized cells is presented. This system ‘C_CTRL' is responsible for all necessary tasks, like sequencing, supervising, controlling of basic functions, error handling, and recording of statistic data. The control system is ‘self-generating' during program start-up – using hardware information from a simple ASCII configuration file. Regardless which and how many components used in a particular cell, there is no additional programming effort for generation of the entire control software.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) make a very significant contribution to the economy of Kosovo. Strategic planning is an extremely valuable long-term planning tool. It is essential for an organization's survival in a rapidly changing, turbulent environment. Tourism sector in Kosovo is hesitantly as industry and this fact is unacceptable for Kosovo community. Kosovo as a small country can offer very attractive and interesting places for staying and enjoying holiday. Given the significance of SME to the Kosovo economy and the fact that no study has yet examined strategic planning in the SME sector, this study seeks to investigate the linkage between strategic planning and success of SME in Kosovo. The primary objective is to determine whether or not there is a relationship between the use of strategic planning by SME and their growth and their contribution to the development of Kosovo.

The authors have been involved over some years in Educaton in Robotics in Austrian Universities. In addition to lectures, seminar as well as laboratory courses are offered for students of different fields of interest. For these purposes some software packages were developed at both Universities. The paper starts with a short summary of results of a report completed by the working group "Education in Robotics and Manufacturing" of the IFAC-EDOCOM. In the following, several software packages illustrating kinematics and kinetics, conventional and "advanced" control algorithms of robots are shortly described and discussed. Two new programming languages - ROBASIC and ROPASCAL - developed mainly for educational purposes will be also described.

The IFAC TC on “Supplemental Ways for Improving International Stability – SWIIS„ is one of the longest situated in IFAC. According to first ideas during the IFAC World Congress in Kyoto 1981 this IFAC – at that time – Working Group organised in 1983 the first Workshop in this highly interdisziplinary field in Austria. Meanwhile a Technical Committee in IFAC, SWIIS was always a bridge between (control) engineers and various other disziplines to open IFAC to other related fields. In this contribution the last 3 years history of this TC will be described to outline recent developments and give some ideas for the future.

The Knowledge and technology transfer is a crucial factor for an sustainable development of developing countries. This paper is focused on selected case studies of contributions for the development of Kosova, made in University for Business and Technology in Kosova. Cases that have been discussed were as following: higher and professional education, research, professional projects in the field of engineering management, mechatronics, robotics, quality management, IT adoption in developing countries, mobility, internationalisation, employability, etc.

One of the main tasks of SWIIS is the application of systems- and control engineering methods for international conflict resolution. In the past the classical approaches from control theory, simulation, decision making…. were used. Here a new idea – application of a very well known tool from production automation “advanced robots” - will be presented. A selected field for international stability or conflict resolution is “humanitarian demining”, which has grown dramatically in the last decade. These robots of the new generation offer possibilities to solve this task in a very efficient way. Finally new developments in humanitarian demining at present and in the future will be discussed and the concept of autonomous, intelligent robot swarms for cleaning minefields is presented.

This paper deals with implementation of a distributed controller for a humanoid robot. This teen sized humanoid robot Archie is currently under development. The main idea is to develop a cost oriented humanoid robot (COHR) to assist humans for their daily life. After a short description of the existing hardware, the control is described. The control is realized by a PI controller for position and velocity of each joint of humanoid robot in specific time order. The main advantage of this method is to synchronize the motion of alljoints necessary for biped walking motion. The developed controller program was first tested by simulation and implemented on the robot. The results on the real robot show the efficiency of this method for the gait motion of the robot. Finally an outlook on further work is given.

Some devices that are containing LCD- screens with a flat bigger than 100 cm 2 are sub-summed under the word LCD- devices. These products are: LCD- flat screen computers, LCD- flat screens, TV- screens, notebooks, display devices for computer games..... Their number will be increasing dramatically in the nearest future. In this contribution first ideas for “End of Life management – EoL ” of such devices, especially possibilities for semi automated disassembly according to the technologies currently available, will be presented and shortly discussed. Main problems are currently the different sizes, the different materials and the “disassembly unfriendly” design.

The game robot soccer provides a good opportunity to implement and test the cooperative group behavior of mobile robots. In this contribution a robot soccer system (Kopacek, 2002; Putz, 2004; Wurzl, 2003 and 2005) will be described. The new software mainly consists, as usual, of a vision system, a communication module and a game strategy module. For the new system robots were developed and a vision system with a digital camera was implemented. The strategies for this new Multi Agent System (MAS) will be highlighted in this paper.

Robotics is a very fast growing field especially in the last years and is a discipline based on: mechanics, physics/mathematics, control engineering, electr(on)ics, computer science. Therefore robots are frequently used as examples for Mechatronic Systems. Robotics unifies two cultures: Science and humanities. The effort to design roboethics should make the unity of these two cultures a primary assumption. This means that experts shall view Robotics as a whole - in spite of the current early stage which recalls a melting pot. Some decades ago social aspects of robotics were discussed. Because of the results and the rapid development of this field ethical issues became more and more important. Therefore the term roboethics was introduced in the literature. The main goal of this contribution is to present and discuss this subject, probably at the first time, from the viewpoint of robotics. First an overview from a practical, robotics viewpoint will be given. Then a short presentation of currently and in the future available robots and some ideas about the ethical problems are discussed. Special emphasis is on the ethical behavior of the system “human-robot” and “End of Life – EoL” management.

The Biped Robots have specific dynamical constraints and stability problems, which reduce significantly their motion range. In these conditions, path planning and tracking becomes very important. The joint profiles have been determined based on constraint equations cast in terms of step length and high, step period, maximum step height etc. In this paper Fuzzy Neural Network Controller for Path-Planning and Tracking on incline terrain (up stairs) of a planar five-link Biped Robot is presented. The locomotion control structure is based on integration of kinematics and dynamics model of Biped Robot. The proposed Control Scheme and Fuzzy Neural Algorithm could be useful for building an autonomous non-destructive testing system based on Biped Robot. Structure of Fuzzy Neural Network Controller is optimized using Genetic Algorithm. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated by simulation example using Matlab software.Copyright © 2005 by ASME

CIMMs (Computer Integrated Manufacturing systems) are important systems for overall automation of manufacturing enterprises, especially big ones. The general issues of the computer system topology were analyzed earlier. The present case study concerns the detailed design of the optimum LAN for the managerial sphere, based on the actual data for a big Polish household appliance manufacturer. For the data, the optimal LAN topology is determined, assuming development of democratic networks.

The next generation of industrial robots will require faster and more accurate control algorithms. Today’s robots work with a relatively low speed and are very heavy. Therefore the robots can be regarded as stiff systems - without remarkable deformations. They are controlled mainly by conventional algorithms like (P-, PI-...). In contrast some robots of the future will be light weight constructed to work with higher speed. Elastic deformations have to be included in the control concepts. Development of control concepts for “advanced” robots requires first accurate but also simple models for the dynamic behaviour of the whole system “robot”. Based on these models appropriate control algorithms can be tested by simulation. For model development and simplification, for development of control algorithms as well as problems of path planning computer aided methods might be a very efficient tool. The paper deals with problems of computer aided methods for tasks of position control mentioned above as well as other tasks necessary for robot control and some software aspects. As examples research works at the Universities of Linz and Vienna are discussed.

Robot soccer was introduced with the purpose to develop intelligent cooperative multi-robot (agents) systems (MAS). From the scientific point of view a soccer robot is an intelligent, autonomous agent, carrying out tasks together with other agents in a cooperative, coordinated and communicative way. A soccer robot is a mechatronic system and consists of a mechanical part, electronics, power supply, drives including gears and sensors. For playing soccer control, path planning, image processing, strategies, communication and cooperation between the robots is necessary. Robot soccer is a good tool to teach people the complicated technical knowledge in the way of playing. For realizing a robot soccer game a lot of theory is necessary. Therefore it is a very cheap – cost oriented (COA) - testbed for verifying these theories in practice for further industrial applications. In this paper selected – COA - industrial applications directly derived from robot soccer will be described.

Robot soccer is a good opportunity to implement and test the cooperative group behavior of mobile robots. There are several categories based on the size of the robot. In this contribution a robot soccer system in the category of NaroSot (Nano Robosoccer Tournament) will be described. The maximum size of the robot in NaroSot category has to be smaller than 4 x 4 x 5.5 centimeters. It is a big challenge to build a robot in such a small size with two wheels, two DC motors, a microcontroller, a communication module, a battery pack and other parts. The robot should be stable and able to move with a maximum speed of 3.5 m/s and an acceleration 8m/s 2 . The hardware consists of the robots, the camera and the host computer. Software is necessary for image processing, communication, game strategies and control of the robots. In the paper the hard- as well as the software of the new “naro” robots, a new fast vision system with a digital camera is described. Furthermore an outlook on realized and future industrial applications of such extremely miniaturized robots will be given.

The line balancing problem, which is NP-hard, concerns any industrial flow line activity. The “bucket brigades” represent a production line example of intrinsic balancing, realized by the functioning protocol itself. The global optimality results from a decentralized control strategy, based upon the collaboration and the synergy of many individual (human) “agents”. The theoretical analysis of the bucket brigades has started with the “Normative Model”. This paper intends a brief survey of the analysis approaches based upon the extensions of this model and the generalizations of the bucket brigades principle.