Industrie 4.0 Management – February 2017:
Industry robots are a substantial component of modern, highly-automated production plants because of their full custom programmability and a multitude of possible applications. But the installation and integration of these systems demands a high degree of expert knowledge – because of a broad spectrum of idiosyncratic types and control commands depending on the manufacturer – which is usually provided by system integrators.
This means that users will keep applying the same robot system over a long period of time – the inherent flexibility of these systems is not exploited. These restrictions still prevent the attainment of the aims of the Industrie 4.0 vision: intelligent, flexible, and self-networking cyber-physical systems. Therefore, methods were developed within the research project AKOMI which allow automated networking and solution independent programming of robot based assembly lines.