Högskolan i Skövde

The increasing globalization is a trend which forces manufacturing industry of today to focus on more cost-effective manufacturing systems and collaboration within global supply chains and manufacturing networks. Cloud Manufacturing (CM) is evolving as a new manufacturing paradigm to match this trend, enabling the mutually advantageous sharing of resources, knowledge and information between distributed companies and manufacturing units. Providing a framework for collaboration within complex and critical tasks, such as manufacturing and design, it increases the companies’ ability to successfully compete on a global marketplace. One of the major, crucial objectives for CM is the coordinated planning, control and execution of discrete manufacturing operations in a collaborative and networked environment. This paper describes the overall concept of adaptive Function Block control of manufacturing equipment in Cloud environments, with the specific focus on robotic assembly operations, and presents Cloud Robotics as “Robot Control-as-a-Service” within CM.