DEVELOPMENT OF A GENERIC COMMUNICATION SERVICE BETWEEN PROGRAMMABLE LOGIC CONTROLLERS AND PERSONAL COMPUTERS USING MICROSOFT ROBOTICS DEVELOPER STUDIO FOR DATA COLLECTION IN AUTOMATED AND SEMI-AUTOMATED MANUFACTURING PROCESSES

摘要

During the period of 1950-1990 productivity in United States industries increased 50 percent due to technological innovation. High-value-added products were a consequence of more efficient manufacturing processes and data processing equipment. It is predicted that in the next decades productivity increases will be largely due to the ability to add flexibility and improve infrastructure through the collection and management of product data. By achieving the goals set forth in this project, a valuable tool for educating future students will be added to our program and we will also continue to improve our laboratory facilities for applied research, education and industrial partnerships. Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (MRDS) is a Windows based environment used to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware already in the market and hardware yet to be built. These characteristics can help to face the major challenge that industry is facing: an industrial environment that brings together a wide range of computer systems, data acquisition systems, technologies, system architectures, operating systems, and applications. This variety makes it increasingly difficult for people and machines to communicate with each other, especially when they describe and format data differently. MRDS and its' compatibility with other Windows products can help with the task of bringing together large amounts of data and formatting it so it can be shared easily. The primary motivation for working on this project is the lack of affordable open-architecture alternatives for teaching, trying out new ideas and interfacing existing and new devices and equipment into the current workplace. Furthermore, it focuses on the creation and development of a generic communication service for Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) using Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio, which is free for personal, academic, and development use. Thus, it is an important added value to engineering academia, because it opens the door to other research areas and innovation that can be converted into highly efficient applications in manufacturing.