eRobotics Meets the Internet of Things: Modern Tools for Today's Challenges in Robotics and Automation

摘要

The "Internet of Things in Manufacturing" (IoTM) today is considered to have a disruptive impact on industrial processes, on value chains and thus on the strategic challenges for the manufacturing industry. In this context, quite a few buzzwords are often heard. The most important among them are "Cyber Physical Systems", "Smart Production/Manufacturing/Factory" and the at least in Europe very commonly heard term “Industrie 4.0”. Especially the derived German term Industrie 4.0 seems to electrify all major players in the field as it conveys the promise for a 4th industrial revolution based on new internet-based technologies and approaches. In the US, very similar ideas are pursued. The most visible driving force behind the various initiatives is the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), founded in March 2014 to bring together the organizations and technologies and to promote the "Industrial Internet". Even at the first glance it is obvious that the initiatives of IIC and Industrie 4.0 competitively pursue very similar goals. This paper will describe the key ideas of the Internet of Things in Manufacturing and will then as an overview show that eRobotic approaches and (virtual) testbeds are key components supporting not only the development of the systems but also the evaluation of proposed standards. We will show applications of eRobotics in the context of Industrie 4.0 in different fields and try to depict new key ideas.