ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of related work and state-of-the-art topics, and focuses on frameworks that support the integration of heterogeneous services in the domains of robotics and industrial automation. It presents a collection of concepts which aid system integration and application development based on functional independent and highly modular software and hardware system components. The chapter describes the application use and the workspace-sharing robotic system and its system components; the development approaches. For system integration and application modelling, framework for distributed automation and control (4DIAC), according to the industrial standard International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61499, was used. The 4DIAC framework consists of an IEC 61499-compliant automation and control environment for distributed systems. One of the main tasks of system development is the establishment of an extendable system architecture, which includes heterogeneous and functional independent hardware and software system components.
