ON THE USE OF SERVICE ORIENTED SOFTWARE PLATFORMS FOR INDUSTRIAL ROBOTIC CELLS

The integration of different robot automation technologies, with the aim for reusing available production solutions, is a major obstacle for deployment of low-cost components into productive (high-performance) systems. Technologies demanding high processing power, like machine vision or voice recognition systems, are normally easy to program but require proprietary languages and platforms, which constitutes an important problem during communications and setup. Instead of the current need for trained specialist, in particular flexible manufacturing in SMEs call for solutions that are easy easy to use and (re)configure. One attempt in that direction is the service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach, which here is accomplished by the use of Universal Plug-and-Play (UPnP) technologies and confronted with real robot application demand represented by an experimental manufacturing cell. Contributions include the way of building software applications to program manufacturing cells whose building blocks are represented by UPnP devices. Such devices encapsulate both manufacturing equipment and interaction methods. The latter is exemplified by a speech recognition system, for which a tool for automatic generation of UPnP devices based on the information contained in speech recognition XML grammars is presented. Experiences form experiments confirms the desired efficiency and simplicity when setting up advanced manufacturing equipment.