ABB IRC5 EIP to Allen bradly control logix

    Very general question here. Are there any general function blocks/Add on profiles for ABB IRC5 when connected over EIP?

    If not, why not? I've never had to integrate ABB with Allen bradley but I have used allen bradley with other robot types and similarly used ABB robots with other PLCs.

    With them being two of the biggest players, I'm a bit shocked at the lack of info in general and specifically AOP or function blocks.

    Am I just looking in the wrong place of do they not exist?

    P.S this is general only, not looking for specific technical answers, only feedback from some of you who integrate Allen bradley with IRC5 regularly.

    Thanks!

    Sorry Lemster, I should have specified. I meant do Allen bradley have AOPs or function blocks in Studio5000 specifically for IRC5 in the same way that they do for many other products. I realise this is a robotics forum but I'm sure many of you are also experts in PLCs.

    Thanks

    An AOP for what? Welding, sealing, MH, laser, other? Any AOP would be completely situational. For example, GM, Ford, Chrysler, etc, would all have their own in-house AOPs (or something equivalent), matched to their own in-house robot configurations.

    The only place I can think of that a rigidly-defined AOP-esque package might exist would be for Safe I/O, b/c those signals are completely predefined and cannot be edited.

    But in the non-safe I/O, anything goes.

    Thank you both for the replies firstly.

    Previously I worked on a cell with a few URs and a compactlogix. UR had an AOP for Studio5000 that was very easy to set up and gave me access to things like TCP position, speed, torque values of the robots in the PLC. Obviously UR developed this and made it available to make them more attractive and user friendly to simpletons like me.

    I'm just surprised that there's not much similar to what I have described, but specifically for Allen bradley to IRC5. Obviously you could write it yourself but given the install base of both I thought I'd find something on either the ABB or AB website but I can't find anything.

    But that's just it -- URs are for more simplistic than most "big iron" robots. ABBs, KUKAs, Fanucs, etc... they don't have any dedicated I/O setups. At Ford, Input 1 might be Motors On, while at GM it might be Input 100. One customer might use single-bit program selection, while another might use BCD. Multiply that by hundreds, if not thousands, of different signals, options, and other configuration details.

    It's simply not possible for ABB, or Rockwell, to create an AOP that covers all those possible different configurations.

    By comparison, URs are almost toys. They simply don't have anything like the range of configuration options that the mainstream industrial robots do. Which is fine, as URs have a very different target audience.

    For an analogy: if URs are iPads, then the major industrial robot brands are more like pure command-line Unix -- not as user-friendly, but far, far more powerful.

    Thanks Skyefire. That's a fair explanation and well made.

    What are your thoughts on Motologix from Allen bradley and Yaskawa then? With that set-up most of the robot programming is in the PLC via function blocks. It's a step further than what I'm talking about, I don't want to eliminate the need to program the robot, but just make the accessibility of robot data in the PLC a bit easier.

    Excuse my ignorance on the matter, I just thought with all this talk of industry 4.0 and the adaptive machine, I thought with ABB being a massive player that allen bradly would look to make the integration of both a bit less work.

    Thanks

    https://www.yaskawa.eu.com/products/softw…/motologix_1669

    Quote from Nortech

    What are your thoughts on Motologix from Allen bradley and Yaskawa then? With that set-up most of the robot programming is in the PLC via function blocks.

    Never used one. Sounds like it's just moving the complexity around, rather than increasing or reducing it.

    Fanuc's CRX robot is similar. It is a normal Fanuc controller, but with an added UI layer that allows for "Lego block" programming, using drag&drop. Makes it easier for novices, but as soon as you need to do anything any more complex, you have to abandon the "block" UI and drill down to the "classic" programming UI.

    Quote from Nortech

    Excuse my ignorance on the matter, I just thought with all this talk of industry 4.0 and the adaptive machine, I thought with ABB being a massive player that allen bradly would look to make the integration of both a bit less work.

    Again, it depends on what you want. There are multiple IioT standards and protocols, and the Big Five support most of them. IIoT has nothing to do with programming, it's about communication. Specifically, bridging the gap between shop-floor automation and "IT/Office" data systems. For nearly any of the major brands, you can buy an option package that will expose variables in the robot to the IIoT network, but the integrator still has to configure that access down to the bit level; read-only vs read-write, bits vs Ints vs Floats vs DWords, and so on. Likewise, AB and Siemens support the major IIoT protocols (OPC-UA, MTConnect, etc), but the configuration is entirely situational. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. As such, the IIoT options are toolboxes for the end user to configure for their own specific use case.

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