Disclosed herein are various medical device components, including components that can be incorporated into robotic and/or in vivo medical devices. Also disclosed are various medical devices for in vivo medical procedures. Included herein, for example, is a surgical robotic device having an elongate device body, a right robotic arm coupled to a right shoulder assembly, and a left robotic arm coupled to a left shoulder assembly.

A robot system including a robot that is controlled by a robot controller and a wireless communication device that is worn or carried by a person present in the periphery of the robot. The wireless communication device has a sensor capable of detecting an acceleration, the wireless communication device is configured to transmit information related to the acceleration to the robot controller of the robot in a state in which the wireless communication device is not operated by the person, and the robot controller performs operation restriction of the robot when the acceleration exceeds a threshold.

A robot system includes: a conveying device configured to convey a workpiece; a robot configured to execute an operation on the workpiece; and circuitry configured to: identify a current position of the workpiece and an object area occupied by an object; identify an interlock area that moves with the current position of the workpiece being conveyed by the conveying device; check an overlap between the interlock area and the object area; and control the robot to execute the operation based on the current position of the workpiece in response to determining that the interlock area does not overlap the object area.

A robot control system according to the present embodiment includes a plurality of mobile robots that moves autonomously in a facility and a control device that controls the mobile robots. When the control device detects that two or more of the mobile robots are in a recovery requiring state, the control device notifies that the two or more mobile robots are in the recovery requiring state, together with priorities of the two or more mobile robots.

A harvesting system includes a vertical frame, a plurality of linear robots, a plurality of cameras and a processor. The vertical frame is configured to be positioned opposite a sector to be harvested. The robots are arranged in pairs stacked vertically in the frame, each pair including first and second robots that are configured to move together along a vertical axis, to move independently of one another along a horizontal axis, and have respective first and second robot arms that are configured to approach the sector and harvest fruit. The plurality of cameras is configured to acquire images of the sector. The processor is configured to identify the fruit in the images and control the robots to harvest the fruit.

Example implementations described herein estimate parameters for equipment that cannot be sensed directly, including determining if such equipment is running or stopping. Example implementations determine the standard throughput per equipment and product, based on history of equipment production data, extract previous and next equipment of robotic arms on the line by using physical topology information of robot arms and equipment, senses and determines throughput of associated robot arms and compares the robot arm throughput with the standard throughputs of the previous and next equipment, which help determine whether the previous/next equipment have stopped.

A method and a device for controlling a number of robots to emergency stop are provided. The method includes arranging multiple position points in a site where robots work and position identifiers corresponding to the position points, and providing corresponding recognizers at bottoms of the robots; when fault signals reported by the robots are detected, determining, according to the fault signals, whether all the robots in the site need to be controlled to emergency stop, wherein if yes, according to current positions and moving speeds of the robots, position points in the site are allocated to the robots as respective emergency stop positions, the robots are controlled to move to the corresponding emergency stop positions, and thereafter the robots are controlled to stop movement. The device comprises a configuration module, a determination module, an allocation module and a control module.

A method for picking and placing items includes the steps of: providing a picking conveyor transporting items to be picked; providing a placing conveyor to which the items are to be placed; and providing a plurality of robots configured to move the items from pick positions on the picking conveyor to place positions on the placing conveyor. For at least one of the plurality of robots there is defined an actual work area A.sub.ac that fulfils the condition A.sub.ac<A.sub.th−(A.sub.ol+A.sub.ex), wherein A.sub.th is a theoretical work area, A.sub.ol is an overlapping work area and A.sub.ex is an excessive work area of the respective robot. By limiting the actual work area A.sub.ac of the robots more than what is done conventionally, the total workload between the robots in pick and place systems may be balanced.

A control system includes a control apparatus and a plurality of robots. The control apparatus includes a function acquisition unit that acquires a function, a function form conversion unit that converts the function into a distributed calculable form, and a variable conversion unit that sets, based on the function which form is converted, variables to be stored by each of the robots and a process corresponding to the variables, to the robot. Each of the plurality of robots a consensus control means that updates a variable value stored by the robot itself based on the set variable while sending and receiving variable values among other communicable robots, and a function value inference means that infers a function value from the variable based on the set process.

In a robot system including robots, lower-level control units respectively coupled to the robots and controlling one of the robots, and an upper-level control unit coupled to the lower-level control units and transmitting command information for control of the robots to the lower-level control units, a method of controlling the robots executed by the upper-level control unit is provided. The upper-level control unit includes a processor having a plurality of processor cores. Part of the processor cores of the plurality of processor cores are isolated from the other processor cores. Communication tasks with the lower-level control units are assigned to the isolated part of the processor cores. The isolated part of the processor cores are controlled to execute the communication tasks with the lower-level control units and the command information is transmitted to the lower-level control units. The isolation of the isolated part of the processor cores is released.