A fieldbus approach to robotic systems reconfiguration

Product life cycles are now far shorter than the life expectancy of an automated facility, so financially justifying investment in an automated production line can no longer be performed on a single product. The systems supplied must therefore be capable of fast reconfiguration in order to produce a range of products during their working life. This may involve making variants of a single product, or increasingly making completely dissimilar products. In order to reconfigure lines in this way there are a number of issues to be addressed. This paper focuses on the issue of rewiring the control system. The use ofthe DeviceNet fieldbus technology can greatly improve the speed and flexibility of making changes to an automated control system. Its use also impacts on the ease of maintenance of the system as well as giving the capability for greatly improved diagnostics. Using network management software to contain all of the complexity of the installation, rather than it being contained in the wiring harness, also improves the system documentation as it is performed automatically with any changes that are made to the system