Using OPC UA for Distributed Industrial Robot Control

The production industry is confronted with a big change from classical factory planning to digitized and networked structures. The line-based or batch mass production of one and the same product over tens of years is developing to an end-user driven individualization with production cycles of less than one year. To react to the fast changing requirements on products and production infrastructure, machine tools and industrial robots as well as the complete intra-factory logistics, have to evolve to universal production tools with high connectivity, the cyber-physical production systems (CPPS). Current monolithic robot control architectures lack flexibility and scalability to support that short production cycles. This paper presents a distributed control architecture that is capable of reorganizing the production process on the fly. The control system uses OPC UA as communication layer and is capable of combining hardware control services together with high level control services and build individual software systems for each automation task. The system is highly scalable in terms of additional components, improved algorithms or location change. Experiments are implemented with an industrial robot with cameras and gripper in a human-robot collaborative pick and place use case.