Control of industrial systems using Android-based devices

Computer control systems for industrial processes need good processing power and memory resources, standard networking options and enough input/output lines for connecting to sensors, actuators and field buses. The explosive development of mobile devices running Android operating system brought us low cost devices that fulfill almost all these requirements for industrial control, missing only input/output lines. This last aspect was solved with launching of the latest 4.x Android release and of multi-interface Android USB hosts chips. The paper presents some test and results of controlling of an industrial system - hydraulic test bench- with a Google Nexus 7 tablet; hardware and software aspects are analyzed and advantages and disadvantages of this solution compared to PC-based one are discussed.