Fieldbus connection of robots with customer higher-level systems

The challenge

Yaskawa’s robots are used in various industries and countries. Depending on region and application, customers use different fieldbus standards in their plants, forcing Yaskawa to support them all to enable seamless interconnection between the robot/controller and the customer’s higher-level system. 
For a new controller generation with PCIe slots, Yaskawa was looking for a board enabling easy implementation of a slave fieldbus connection for many different standards. A common API and real-time drivers should allow fast implementation into the controller and enable switching of the fieldbus standard without the need for time and money consuming adaptation of the application.  

The solution

Due to many years of cooperation in other areas, Yaskawa already knew the Ixxat solutions from HMS. At that time the Ixxat INpact was a quite new product in the HMS portfolio and Yaskawa took a closer look to see whether the board would fit into the controller application providing the required fieldbus connection. 
Ixxat INpact is based on a common hardware platform that can be used in different fieldbus environments by means of a software update. HMS supports here the industrial Ethernet standards EtherCAT, PROFINET, EtherNet/IP, Modbus-TCP and Powerlink. The card is also available with the same software API for PROFIBUS and for PROFINET with a POF interface in accordance with the AIDA standard. 

With just one card, we are now able to provide our customers with access to several different fieldbus standards!

Mats Martinsson, R&D Department, YASKAWA Nordic AB

Driver adaptation

Ixxat INpact comes with drivers and programming APIs for Windows, Linux and INtime. Since Yaskawa was using the proprietary VxWorks real-time operating system from Wind River on their systems, an adaptation of the existing drivers was required. 
HMS provided the open driver sources to Yaskawa and supported them during the VxWorks portation. The engineers from Yaskawa were able to make this portation within a short time and implemented the Ixxat INpact successfully into their controller. By implementing one card, Yaskawa is now able to support Industrial Ethernet fieldbus connection for different standards. 
Due to the common API, the software application running on the controller is able to work with all network standards. A time-consuming adaptation to the different standards is not required.  

The new controllers, offering fieldbus connection for many different standards, are already successfully released and available on the market since 2018.