industrial//industrial automation//robot controller

An industrial robot (KUKA, ABB, FANUC) comes with its own controller. The plant PLC does not command every joint motor current; it sends the robot controller high-level orders such as "start program 17", "part available", "safe zone", "cycle complete", and the controller resolves kinematics, servos, interpolation, trajectories, safety and coordinated motion inside.

An industrial robot (KUKA, ABB, FANUC) comes with its own controller. The plant PLC does not command every joint motor current; it sends the robot controller high-level orders such as "start program 17", "part available", "safe zone", "cycle complete", and the controller resolves kinematics, servos, interpolation, trajectories, safety and coordinated motion inside.

From the PLC's point of view the robot is a sophisticated black box. The smarter the subsystem, the less the PLC needs to know about its internals: more complex, more flexible.

The controller is polyglot on purpose: it integrates through several industrial interfaces and protocols (PROFINET, EtherNet/IP, fieldbus I/O, safety buses), so it can sit in a Siemens cell or a Rockwell cell (industrial Ethernet).

Coordinating the robot's axes with each other and with external axes is a motion control problem, not a Ladder problem.