Display MoreSome things that come to mind.
Is the robot also using a fieldbus (ethernet/ip, profinet, EGD, etc.) on the same ethernet connection?
What is the network connection to the PC routed through? Managed or Un-managed switches? Un-managed may mean the robot is exposed and overloaded with network traffic.
Can the ICT guy force the network connection to a low speed?
Can the ICT guy inspect the connection with diagnostic tools to check for dropped / incomplete packets? If not, there are a lot of free ethernet tools available for simple diagnostics that can be run on the PC.
Can you temporarily isolate the PC-Robot connection from the plant network?
To answer your questions first:
- The robot isn't using a fieldbus over the same connection
- The connection was routed through unmanaged switches
- Our IT guy did try some different speeds, didnt make a difference
- He also said that monitoring the traffic to see which data is causing the problem would be kind of difficult, since there is quite alot of traffic going over the network itself.
And to get to our last point, that's what we decided to do and which turned out to be the solution. We set up a local network between the robot and the computer it communicates with and ever since then, the robot has been running like a charm. Seemingly there was somekind of traffic going over the network that was causing the robot to freeze up.
Thanks alot for your input, much appreciated.