Integration of Robot and IIoT over the OPC Unified Architecture

Abstract

Cloud technology uses the main function of IoT (Internet of Things) devices to quickly transfer huge amounts of data because data must be transmitted efficiently and efficiently among equipments. IoT enables smart devices to collect and share data without manual assistance. Compared to IoT, IIoT (Industrial IoT) technology is used for industrial purposes, but common industrial communication protocols such as Modbus TCP and Profinet only provide real-time data and cannot provide safe and reliable historical data. The OPC unified architecture (OPC UA) overcomes the above shortcomings and changes the entire industrial communication protocol and resolves the issue of object-oriented concepts. Other IoT protocols such as RTI DDS and MQTT do not emphasize the integration of industrial equipments. In this paper, we provide a solution enabling the smart robotic arm (Staubli) to convert its original communication protocol (SOAP/WSDL) into the role of an OPC UA server. This solution is successfully integrated in ERP/MES manufacturing production systems. The proposed method can help basic IoT robots be seamlessly embedded in ERP/MES manufacturing systems. We demonstrated how the OPC UA cloud computing platform worked. When a PCB color image was uploaded from the client, the OPC UA server processed it by the Gaussian blur and Canny filters and then returned the processed image to the client in a gray-scale image.