New Communication Concepts for Industrial Robots in the Flexible Production of the Future

摘要

Communication in the automation field today is characterized by the use of a variety of bus systems with differing bus physics and protocols. For the manu-facturers of industrial robots this variety leads to extremely high costs for develop-ment and training on the one hand and on the other decreases interoperability of components within a production line. Through the gradual increase of Ethernet technology in the automation field indus-trial communication could be standardized considerably to deal with all the require-ments of future automation and production strategies. To demonstrate the advan-tages of an Ethernet automation network KUKA Robotics and twelve other market leaders decided to built a production cell based on: 1. Decentralized control structure 2. Standardized Ethernet real-time communication 3. Standardized web-based HMI tech-nology and backup/restore mecha-nism 4. Standardized plug&play mechanism and network diagnostics During the presentation we will have a online connection via the Internet to the production cell in Augsburg/Germany to demonstrate web-based diagnosis, configuration and control.