A ROS2-Based Framework for Industrial Automation Systems

With the development of industrial manufacturing towards flexibility and efficiency, the automation equipment, including manipulator, automated guide vehicle (AGV), Computer numerical control machine tools (CNC) and other intelligent individuals, has become an indispensable part of industrial system. In order to build a reliable and robust automation system rapidly, a reasonable software framework for controlling the automation equipment is necessary. To address this problem, this paper proposes a framework for construction of an industrial automation system. The system consists of 2 parts, which are motion control system (MCS) and OpenPLC. The MCS is based on ROS2, which provides real-time communication middleware. Furthermore, this paper implements new function blocks to connect OpenPLC and the MCS. With this system, it only needs OpenPLC language to realize the control rather than using different languages to control robots and other equipment in an automation line. In section 4, a simple use case is put forward. The experiment validated the correctness and feasibility of this framework.