Equipment Oems also actively adopt integrated robot control, mainly focusing on the corresponding equipment performance improvement, and can save costs through self-built robot ontology, supply chain control, to provide users with more complete maintenance services;
Just before the Hannover show, Siemens announced a collaboration with UR and Festival robots: Siemens PLC will be able to control UR and Festival co-robots via TIA via the Standard Robot Command Interface (SRCI).
Previously, Siemens PLC has supported Comau, Staubli, Kawasaki and Yaskawa robots through SRCI control, and now UR and Stanka become the fifth and sixth robot brands, respectively, to support this feature. Next, ABB, KUKA, Fanuc, Epson, Daming and other robots will continue to support the integration with Siemens PLC, in addition to domestic manufacturers Eston, Tel, and Yue Jiang robots are also pending.
This will mean that the mainstream brands of industrial robots and collaborative robots on the market will enter the SRCI "circle of friends" and continue to support integrated control with automation systems. In fact, integrated robot control has already tested the water of automation brands, and in the past two years, with the outbreak of robot applications, the demand for integrated control has gradually emerged, and the high-profile promotion of industry leaders like Siemens will significantly accelerate this trend. We believe that the market for automation equipment with integrated robot control will enter a phase of rapid growth in the coming years.
Siemens SRCI Integrated Robot control system partner brand (Source: Siemens official website)
What is integrated robot control?
At present, the integration of industrial or collaborative robots and equipment usually uses communication connections, robots and mechanical equipment are respectively controlled by a special controller and PLC, and the two controllers are connected by a communication protocol to achieve coordination. In this scenario, the control of the robot and the device are independent from each other, and different software systems are used. The robot body is equipped with a special controller, if the integrator or equipment manufacturer secondary development, need to master the robot programming. Because the control system and programming language of each robot brand are often different, the integration of different brands of robots requires a large workload and high difficulty.
Therefore, integrated robot control came into being, mainly to unify the control of mechanical equipment and robots. There are two main ways, one is to retain the special controller hardware of the robot, represented by Siemens, whose PLC supporting SRCI function can analyze the control instructions of the robot and merge them into TIA through the protocol, so that engineers can control the robot of the above-mentioned cooperative brands in the development environment of Siemens, without needing to master the special robot programming language.
Another way of integration is to cancel the hardware of the robot controller, directly use the automatic controller with motion control function, and regard each axis of the robot as the parts of the mechanical equipment, which is controlled by the universal controller. Representative products of this route include Rockwell's Unified Robot Control solution, B&R's Machine-Centric Robotics, Schneider's PacDrive, and Omron's NJ501-R series. In addition to the body part of such robots from robot manufacturers, there are many self-built cases of equipment manufacturers or integrators.
The integrated robot control market is growing at the right time
Compared with the communication connection mode, the integrated control of equipment and robot has many advantages. For example, eliminating dedicated robot controllers to save control cabinet space; The integrated control makes it easier to synchronize the motion of the device and the robot and achieve faster tempo. When multiple robots are integrated, the universal controller has the advantages of "one belt and one belt" and has the advantages of performance and cost. In non-standard situations, integrators make their own robots and develop special configurations using universal controllers... Let's wait.
However, integrated robot control is not a new concept, automation and robot brands in this area of cooperation can be traced back to 2015, but the response is lukewarm, until the past two years with a number of manufacturers of new actions, the concept gradually popular. In addition to its own performance benefits, we believe that the development of integrated robot control is inextricably linked to the current market environment, mainly due to two key factors:
First, the popularization and large-scale production of robots have reduced the cost of robots, and the application of robots in automation equipment has become more and more common. The average number of robots used in a single device has increased, and the requirements for synchronization, speed and accuracy of robots and equipment have increased, and the control system that relies on communication connections is sometimes difficult to meet the performance requirements, which has led to the demand for a unified control system.
The second is the high threshold for the use of robot systems. In the context of the current labor shortage in developed economies, especially the extreme shortage of professional engineers, the integration of general automation and robot control systems can greatly reduce the threshold for the use of automation and labor costs. For integrators and equipment manufacturers, this is not only related to the early development, but also crucial in the later equipment maintenance and service links.
On the eve of demand, manufacturers compete for the blue ocean
With the popularization of robots and the continuous shortage of professional labor, the market acceptance of integrated robot control has accelerated significantly, starting with the European and American markets. Market participants of different identities have entered this blue ocean to discover the benefits that this technology can bring.
Automation manufacturers benefit from the most direct, not only can share the cake of the robot controller, but also through supporting robots, for its servo drive and even motor business;
Equipment Oems also actively adopt integrated robot control, mainly focusing on the corresponding equipment performance improvement, and can save costs through self-built robot ontology, supply chain control, to provide users with more complete maintenance services;
For robot manufacturers, access integration solutions need open control systems, but this can reduce the user threshold and increase their brand competitiveness;
For end users, the integrated robot control system is more convenient to operate and has performance advantages in multi-robot scenarios, so they are also happy to choose integrated solutions.
Therefore, since ABB and B&R launched integrated robot control, not only a number of frontline automation brands to promote integrated controllers, robot brands are also actively involved in cooperation, but also the emergence of specialized robot ontology manufacturers, popular in the European and American markets. Among equipment manufacturers, OEM companies represented by packaging machines and non-standard automation companies continue to introduce models with integrated robot control, and even standardize the configuration of homemade robots to become an optional fixed model.
As for the two integration methods (retain or eliminate the special controller for the robot), they are suitable for different markets, and each has its own advantages. For example, the SRCI mode can better control complex robot configurations, such as six-axis robots, by retaining the robot controller. Although the current market only Siemens PLC support SRCI, but in fact this function is developed and maintained by Profinet an open standard, the future of other manufacturers may also move in this direction, especially in the field of general purpose PLC products have advantages of automation manufacturers. On the contrary, the cancellation of the integrated method of the robot controller is more suitable for simple and repeated robot actions, such as the pick and place operation of parallel robots, because it relies on the operation and control performance of the universal controller.
