How to meet the modular requirements of collaborative robot programming?

Today's advanced robots are highly complex structures with multiple subsystems. They use mechanical arms with various axes drives for specific tools, gripping systems measuring instruments at both ends. In pick--place applications, other sensor systems are required to control movement, identify objects positions. With the emergence of automation  collaborative robots (working in the same workspace as humans), the number of tasks building blocks has increased significantly.

Positioning navigation of mobile robots in industrial environments as well as safe human-machine interaction. In Industry 4.0 environments, M2M interfaces to surrounding machines systems are also required, with the goal of coordinating tasks with each other. All types of robots (autonomous, cooperative, collaborative) require powerful software components high-performance embedded systems.

In the next few years, the market demand for intelligent robots will grow significantly. For example, the compound annual growth rate of the market for automatic robot systems is expected to reach 23.7% by 2023, the new market area of collaborative robots will triple (an average annual growth of up to 59%). Software development is a great challenge for manufacturers, system integrators users. In order to make extremely complex automatic robot solutions collaborative, more subsystems must be integrated into them.

Today, robotics software is still often implemented as a closed system, often using various custom x86 ARM hardware such as ASICS FPGAs. Often, the software is customized for each robot, making it difficult to reuse. Robot control, navigation, machine vision, task coordination, HMI, all other tasks are programmed in the same way.

As a result, it is currently almost impossible to replace software components (even for the most frequently required functions) use them on other hardware platforms. This means that for each new design, the robot software needs to be re-implemented, which is only error-prone time-consuming, but can also significantly delay the introduction of much-needed innovative solutions, to mention the hassle of operators to program each robot specifically.

Collaborative robots require hardware software components that can be assembled modularly in order to adapt to their tasks. Programming efforts should be minimal even non-existent; they should be sufficient to program the modules.

Essentially, software developers can focus on each functional module without to consider the internal components of other components. More importantly, it can adopt a modular approach to merge functions, such as cooperative collaborative components, logic units for specific operators, even merge functions implemented by different manufacturers. Finally, it also reduces the work required for system integrators end users to adapt customer-customized programs, which will greatly promote the popularization of robots.