AbstractRobot control is a key competence for robot manufacturers and a lot of development is made to increase robot performance, reduce robot costand introduce new functionalities。 Examples of development areas that get big attention today are multi robot control, safe control, force control,3D vision, remote robot supervision and wireless communication。 The application benefits from these developments are discussed as well as thetechnical challenges that the robotmanufacturersmeet。57652
Model-based control is now a key technology for the control of industrial robots andmodelsand control schemes are continuously refined to meet the requirements on higher performance even when the cost pressure leads to the design ofrobot mechanics that is more difficult to control。 Driving forces for the future development of robots can be found in, for example, new robotapplications in the automotive industry, especially for the final assembly, in small andmedium size enterprises, in foundries, in food industry and inthe processing and assembly of large structures。 Some scenarios on future robot control development are proposed。 One scenario is that light-weight robot concepts could have an impact on future car manufacturing and on future automation of small and medium size enterprises (SMEs)。Such a development could result in modular robots and in control schemes using sensors in the robot arm structure, sensors that could also be usedfor the implementation of redundant safe control。 Introducing highly modular robots will increase the need of robot installation support, makingPlug and Play functionality even more important。 One possibility to obtain a highly modular robot program could be to use a recently developednew type of parallel kinematic robot structure with large work space in relation to the robot foot print。 For further efficient use of robots, thescenario of adaptive robot performance is introduced。
This means that the robot control is optimised with respect to the thermal and fatigue load onthe robot for the specific program that the robot performs。 The main conclusion of the presentation is that industrial robot development is far awayfrom its limits and that a lot of research and development is needed to obtain a more widely use of robot automation in industry。# 2007 Elsevier Ltd。 All rights reserved。Keywords: Industrial robots; Robot control; Control functions; Control applications 1。 IntroductionThe development of industrial robots is characterized by amultidisciplinary fusion of a large spectrum of technologies。Many of these technologies are not specific for robotics and canbe developed from solutions in other much larger product areas。However, robot control and then especially robot motioncontrol, is very specific to the robot product and constitutes oneof the most important key competences for the development ofindustrial robotics。 By applying and developing advancedcontrol, it is possible to continuously improve the robotperformance, which is necessary in order to increaseperformance and lower cost of industrial robot automation。It should be emphasized that the automotive industriesincluding their supply chains are the dominating customers for industrial robots of today (UNECE, 2004)。 This means that therequirements emanating from this type of manufacturingsystem drive much of the robot development。 Thus, most robotsof today are well adapted to cost sensitive high volume flexibleproduction in a very competitive environment。 This has made itnecessary for the robot manufacturers to make very big effortson the basic requirements on cost efficiency, high reliability andhigh productivity。 Moreover, it has been necessary to adapt therobot control to the plant automation systems with respect toapplication protocols, communication systems, I/O-interfaces,PLC-equipment, user interfaces, process equipment, etc。, foroptimal use of the robots and for short change-over timesbetween different products (RIA & NIST, 2000)。In the automotive industry, which will be the starting pointfor this presentation, full robot automation is usually found forcar body assembly, press tending, painting and coating and tosome extent for engine and power train assembly (ABB-1,2003)。 These applications are well established and the robot features with respect to installation, programming, integration,maintenance, performance and functionalities are continuouslyrefined。 From a control point of view, this means increasingrequirements on robustness, stability and accuracy。 At the sametime, the cost pressure implies the need of development of lessrigid mechanical structures with more complex mechanicalrobot vibration modes and larger variations of the dynamics ofthe inpidual robots, which must be handled by the controlsystem。Looking further into the automation of car manufacturing,only few robots are used today for the final assembly。 Here, newrobot technology and new flexible automation solutions areneeded to handle the complex assembly tasks and the variabilityof the product geometries。 One big challenge for industrialrobotics in the future is to obtain economically feasiblesolutions to this kind of applications, where robot control needsto deal with tolerances in geometries and processes, to be moreintuitive and to be more interactive。 A break through in thisdirection could give a new wave of robotics for a large spectrumof industrial applications, where robots are not realistic to usetoday。