Towards common infrastructure for advanced manufacturing control systems

In order to make robots applicable to new unstructured environments, intelligent control systems with advanced sensing capabilities are needed. However, developments made in the field of intelligent sensor based control strategies, of programming paradigms and of communication are very difficult to incorporate into contemporary controllers of manufacturing devices. The underlying reason for this problem is the absence of a common ´datalogic infrastructure´ among producers of manufacturing control systems, as opposed to the mature infrastructure built up in the field of computer workstations. The reality customers face is a market with control systems which in their fundamental hardware and software architectures are incompatible. A promising solution to these problems is proposed in the paper, for manufacturing control systems in general and robot controllers in particular. A test implementation for robots is also presented.<>