Patent ID: 8315736

Claim:
A method comprising the steps of: providing a system including a plurality of robots and a plurality of robot controllers, each of the robot controllers having a load, re-balance subsystem, a load balance subsystem, a robot state change detector subsystem, a communicator subsystem, each of the robot controllers interconnected and in communication with one another via the communicator subsystems, and a motion control subsystem, each of the robots further having a workload; monitoring the state of the robots with at least one of the robot state change detector subsystems; communicating a change in state of one of the robots from at least one of the robot state change detector subsystems to at least one of the load re-balance subsystems when the change in state of one of the robots is detected; recomputing the workloads of the robots on one of the load re-balance subsystems to adjust for the change in state of one of the robots; communicating the recomputed workloads from the load re-balance subsystem to the load balance subsystems of each robot controller, each of the load balance subsystems executing the recomputed workloads on each of the robots; wherein the system further includes a conveyor, the method further comprising the steps of: communicating from the robot controller of the robot having had the change in state to the other robot controllers that the robot having had the change in state is ready to return to an original state; communicating an encoder value with global time for each of the other robots from each of the other robot controllers to the robot controller of the robot ready to return to the original state; comparing the encoder value with global time for each of the other robots to an encoder value with global time for the robot ready to return to the original state; and synchronizing the encoder count with global time for the robot ready to return to the original state with the encoder value with global time for each of the robots, whereby the robot ready to return to the original state may return to the original state without interrupting the operation of the other robots.