industrial//industrial automation//robot controller

A robot controller is the dedicated control unit that comes with an industrial robot (KUKA, ABB, FANUC) and resolves kinematics, servos, interpolation, trajectories, safety and coordinated motion inside, so that the plant PLC only has to give it high-level orders. The PLC does not command every joint motor current; it sends orders such as *start program 17*, *part available*, *safe zone* or *cycle complete*.

A robot controller is the dedicated control unit that comes with an industrial robot (KUKA, ABB, FANUC) and resolves kinematics, servos, interpolation, trajectories, safety and coordinated motion inside, so that the plant PLC only has to give it high-level orders. The PLC does not command every joint motor current; it sends orders such as start program 17, part available, safe zone or cycle complete.

From the PLC's point of view the robot is a sophisticated black box, a peer controller it hands orders to. What the robotics notes look at inside the arm matters less on the factory floor than which protocol the two speak. The PLC owns the cell sequence and the robot controller owns the motion, and the handshake between them (start, done, fault, safe) is where integrators spend their time. 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.