A modular control system for flexible robotized manufacturing cells

Abstract

In co-operation with an Austrian small sized company, the Institute for Handling Devices and Robotics at the Vienna University of Technology started a project with the goal to reduce the time necessary for planning, programming and set-up of robot equipped manufacturing cells. In this contribution a modular, object-oriented control system for robotized cells is presented. This system ‘C_CTRL' is responsible for all necessary tasks, like sequencing, supervising, controlling of basic functions, error handling, and recording of statistic data. The control system is ‘self-generating' during program start-up – using hardware information from a simple ASCII configuration file. Regardless which and how many components used in a particular cell, there is no additional programming effort for generation of the entire control software.