Recently, the national key research and development program -- "Research and Development of Key technologies and application platforms of Industrial robot middleware" has passed the strict test of Kaiyun Liancuang (Beijing) Evaluation Center, marking a breakthrough in Chinese robot "middleware" technology. The project was led by Jiangsu Jeri Technology Group Co., LTD., with the collaboration of Shanghai STEP Robot Co., LTD., Hunan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhejiang University, 716 Research Institute of China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, Yunnan Kunchuan Intelligent Equipment Co., LTD., Lianyungang Jeri Deep Soft Technology Co., LTD.
The existing robot control system is mostly information island with closed architecture. How to use industrial robot middleware technology to integrate distributed heterogeneous resources, reduce system coupling and improve the openness and intelligence level of its control system is the bottleneck problem that needs to be solved urgently for the development of industrial robot industry.
In order to solve the above problems, "middleware" technology comes into being, aiming at developing a service-oriented architecture based industrial robot middleware and its application platform, to realize the transparent interaction and distributed collaboration of robot information physical system. With the application of "middleware" technology, heterogeneous robots of multiple brands and different systems can achieve seamless collaboration in cross-platform and cross-system design, development, debugging and deployment, which greatly saves the time required for early production line integration and deployment in industrial sites.
At the same time, the "middleware" technology framework has a powerful component ecosystem, which can standardize the interface of various components and provide common algorithm components such as visual processing, trajectory planning, protocol conversion, etc., to facilitate the integration and use of the underlying hardware manufacturers. In addition, based on the design concept of bus, the real-time transparent interaction and real-time monitoring of the data in the robot production process are realized. The code-free choreography service supports the robot function, which greatly reduces the programming work of developers in the production line deployment, and rapidly improves the intelligent level of production line and production efficiency.
Based on this "middleware" platform, Shanghai STEP Robot Co., LTD., Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Zhejiang University jointly deployed the visual assembly workstation and stamping production line, realizing the fast, flexible and light code integration of the production line, greatly improving the customer's intelligence level and production efficiency. In addition, the "middleware" technology has also been put into use in the production lines of ship welding, wall climbing painting, AGV intelligent parking and other enterprises such as Jeri and Kunchuan. It can be predicted that in the near future, "middleware" technology will help China's manufacturing to China's smart manufacturing leapfrog development.
STEP Robot automatic stamping production line
STEP Visual assembly workstation
Robot middleware node control station device interaction management software
Low code programming based on service Bus service choreographer
Based on Robot middleware
Construct the digital twin system of STEP visual assembly workstation