Purpose: Machining fixtures must fit exactly the work piece to support it appropriately. Even slight change in the design of the work piece renders the costly fixture useless. Substitution of traditional fixtures by a programmable multi‐robot system supporting the work pieces requires a specific control system and a specific programming method enabling its quick reconfiguration. The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel approach to task planning (programming) of the reconfigurable fixture system.Design/methodology/approach: The multi‐robot control system has been designed following a formal approach based on the definition of the system structure in terms of agents and transition function definition of their behaviour. Thus, a modular system resulted, enabling software parameterisation. This facilitated the introduction of changes brought about by testing different variants of the mechanical structure of the system. A novel approach to task planning (programming) of the reconfigurable fixture system has been developed. Its solution is based on constraint satisfaction problem approach. The planner takes into account physical, geometrical, and time‐related constraints.Findings: Reconfigurable fixture programming is performed by supplying CAD definition of the work piece. Out of this data the positions of the robots and the locations of the supporting heads are automatically generated. This proved to be an effective programming method. The control system on the basis of the thus obtained plan effectively controls the behaviours of the supporting robots in both drilling and milling operations.Originality/value: The shop‐floor experiments with the system showed that the work piece is held stiffly enough for both milling and drilling operations performed by the CNC machine. If the number of diverse work piece shapes is large, the reconfigurable fixture is a cost‐effective alternative to the necessary multitude of traditional fixtures. Moreover, the proposed design approach enables the control system to handle a variable number of controlled robots and accommodates possible changes to the hardware of the work piece supporting robots.

It is known that the independent component analysis (ICA) (also called blind source separation) can be applied only if the number of received signals (sensors) is at least equal to the number of mixed sources, contained in the sensor signals. In this paper an application of the ICA is proposed for hidden (secured) image transmission by communication channels. We assume that only a single image mixture is transmitted. A friendly receiver contains the remaining original sources and therefore it can separate the hidden image of lowest energy. The influence of two nonlossless signal reduction stages, compression by principal component analysis and signal quantization, onto the separation ability is tested. Constraints of the mixing process are discussed that make impossible the hidden image separation without the key images.