A Configurable Skill Oriented Architecture Based on OPC UA

Abstract

Over the last years, research done in automation and industrial robotics has established the foundations for skill-oriented systems based on the OPC UA standard. Nevertheless, utilizing these advances in other areas of robotics research can be challenging and time consuming. We present a framework aiming to reduce this entry threshold. Our solution is an open source, easy to configure tool based on OPC UA, that provides with a hardware agnostic, skill-oriented, event driven interface to systems. The framework allows integrating external hardware and software by means of plugins. It also provides a mechanism for endowing skills with hardware agnostic motion control. We demonstrate how our framework can be combined with state of the art approaches to control in a simulated assembly task with multiple robots, conveyors, actuators and sensors involved.