June 2015
41
E
MBEDDED
C
OMPUTING
Long-term partnership ensures
safe and secure robot control
By Peter Hoser,
Fujitsu
This article shows
how close cooperation
between the main-board supplier
and its customer – a robotic company
– both located in Augsburg,
Germany, results in global market
success for the innovative
robot products.
n
In recent years, innovations by KUKA
have had a sustained in uence on the world
of automation, from the Robocoaster safely
swinging people through the air at theme
parks to the new lightweight robots that can
assemble highly sensitive parts and collabo-
rate directly with humans. Yet it was with the
introduction of the current KR C4 in partic-
ular that KUKA revolutionized robot control.
is robot control is based on PCs and open
industry standards and was the rst robot
control in which a complete safety control is
integrated as a so ware function.
As the basis for their controls, KUKA has
been using mainboards by Fujitsu for many
years, now in the fourth generation. An
important reason for this is that the short
communication and delivery routes from the
Fujitsu mainboard development and produc-
tion plant in Augsburg, Germany, to KUKA
headquarters, also based in Augsburg, are a
tremendous advantage over mainboard man-
ufacturers from Asia. Even more important
is the synthesis of customer-speci c features
and economic scale e ects.
Having tested the Fujitsu mainboards over
several months before the start of their coop-
eration, KUKA found the boards met the high
standards of industrial robotics in terms of
high availability and durability. As the main-
board is a central component of the control, it
has to ful ll very high requirements: in addi-
tion to the guaranteed availability of all indi-
vidual components, it is indispensable that all
systems deliver reliable and extremely stable
performance even under rough and demand-
ing conditions in manufacturing environ-
ments. e control systems have to reliably
meet the challenging safety and security
requirements 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at
an ambient temperature up to 45°C.
Due to a long-term development partnership,
the mainboard supplier already knows the
speci c needs of the robotic company from
previous product generations. Even before
they start designing, they involve the robotic
manufacturer in the development process
of new products. is gives the exibility to
ful ll the customer’s wishes in terms of the
board layout, special functionalities, and the
BIOS. Instead of costly customized versions
especially for this customer, Fujitsu make
KUKA’s preferences part of the standard lay-
out of their industrial mainboards. us, the
boards can be manufactured in very large
numbers, which, along with the high degree
of automation, enables to produce the boards
at competitive conditions despite the high
wage level in Germany. For the robotic man-
ufacturer, who delivers some 20,000 robots
per year to a highly competitive market, this
is an important contribution to optimizing
costs. e fact that Fujitsu mainboards are
based on a standardized product with a high
degree of product maturity proved another
point in their favour. e special functional-
ities KUKA demands from the mainboards
are mostly related to functional safety as well
as security issues. In robotics it is particularly
important to clearly di erentiate between
safety and security. Subsuming both aspects
under the term protection tends to confuse
two areas that present control developers with
completely di erent tasks. You can summa-
rize the di erence as follows: safety protects
humans from machines, security protects
machines from humans.
In industrial robotics, there are several main
tasks. KR C4 assigns these to various cores of
a multi-core processor. us, the multi-core
processor with its independently operating
computing cores enables the integration of
safety and other control components within
the so ware, components which previously
had to be implemented in the form of exter-
nal hardware components. Drive control is
the fundamental task level. It requires a very
high and deterministic real-time clocking fre-
quency. Situated on the level above it is the
robot control proper, which determines where
the motor power should be directed. A still
higher level is occupied by functional safety,
