Design of Flexible Cyber-Physical Production Systems Architecture for Industrial Robot Control

Current industrial needs are focused in the generation of agile, flexible, and customizable manufacturing systems. To be able to cope with the high production diversities and the frequent demand changes of the market, enterprises tend to implement modular manufacturing processes. In this type of intelligent processes, robotic cells are usually integrated to perform complex manipulation and transportation tasks. New generation industrial robots are built incorporating special processing units which can operate under embedded software. This characteristic allows robots to be compatible with the automation standard IEC-61499. It proposes a generic distributed architecture for the generation of flexible and modular production systems, with the requirement of using controller devices which can work under an embedded software. This paper proposes the development of a low-cost robotic controller compatible with IEC-61499. The system is based on the use of a robotic cell to wield elements in a modular manufacturing line. The cell is composed by a YouBot Robotic Arm operating under the control of the development board Raspberry Pi 3B.