Authors:
Daniela Hossu
and
Andrei Hossu
Affiliation:
University Politehnica of Bucharest, Faculty of Control and Computers, Romania
Keyword(s):
Industrial Robotic Application, Ethernet-based communication, Data transfer consistency, Artificial Vision System, Control Management System, Routing Control System.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Industrial Networks and Automation
;
Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics
;
Robotics and Automation
Abstract:
The actual stream in automation control systems is to distribute the control tasks among different modular and easy to integrate processing cells. It is part of this trend the increase of the use of Ethernet technology for
machine-machine data communication inside this distributed based architecture. The paper presents a robotic handling application of industrial parts transferred by a transport conveyor. Data representing a set of parameters of the parts to be handle from the conveyor is provided by a Routing Control System (RCS). The Control Management System (CMS), which controls a number of robotic cells is receiving this data from RCS and merge it with the information provided by an Inspection System (Artificial Vision System). The communication between these two Control Systems (RCS and CMS) is Ethernet-based. Ethernet technology is good, reliable and fast for large amount of data, but because of its non-deterministic character, it has a lack of tools for data synchronization
. The paper includes an analysis of the experimental results of the measurements of the non-deterministic factor of the existing network. The "worst case scenario" of the largest communication delay caused by Ethernet traffic and the minimum time between two consecutive data commands, reveals that application requirements could not be achieved without recovering data transfer time-consistency. The paper is presenting a mechanism developed at protocol level, in order to guarantee the consistency in time, at CMS level (data consumer), of the merging process of the data provided by the two application partners, RCS and Vision System as the data producers.
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