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.

XNX-AMAI-NHNNN 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.

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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.

XNX-AMAI-NHNNN 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.