THE SMART ROBOT FACTORY IN THE BROWN­FIELD

Open Industry 4.0 Alliance member KUKA demon­strates the freestyle in Industry 4.0: connecting a manu­fac­turing cell to the cloud in ongoing produc­tion and providing it with all the features of a smart factory. This was only made possible thanks to team­work between members of the alliance, first and fore­most: Fujitsu, SAP and 3d Signals. Robots have built robots at KUKA before — now they are branching out into the cloud, with all the bene­fits of higher throughput, complete manu­fac­turing trans­parency and predic­tive main­te­nance to mini­mize down­time.

Making the smart factory a reality requires coop­er­a­tion. More than 85 national and global indus­trial compa­nies have recog­nized this and joined forces with the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance in multi­lat­eral part­ner­ships. The outstanding feature of this appli­ca­tion example is the way it was imple­mented. The starting point was neither factory-new compo­nents nor a “test setup” in the  corner of the KUKA machining shop. In line with the philos­ophy of the alliance, the appli­ca­tion was imple­mented with compo­nents that have already been in oper­a­tion for some time, i.e., in the so-called “brown­field”. This also neces­si­tated a few small retro­fits, such as machines and soft­ware that did not orig­i­nate from Alliance members but had to be inte­grated into the process.

Commenting on brown­field and retro­fitting, Nils Herzberg, Alliance spokesperson and Senior Vice Pres­i­dent and Global Head for Strategic Part­ner­ships for Digital Supply Chain & Indus­trie 4.0 at SAP, explains, “The addi­tional chal­lenge we all face is that in the facto­ries, some of these machines are 30 years old and they don’t ‘know’, so to speak, what IIoT or Smart Factory means. So, there are a large number of retrofit require­ments that relate to the inter­op­er­ability issue, which I think adds an extra element to the complexity.”

THE KUKA MANU­FAC­TURING CELL IN THE IN-HOUSE MACHINING SHOP

“Our fully auto­mated and networked robotic cell combines the analog and digital worlds of smart produc­tion,” says Dr. Chris­tian Liedtke, Head of Strategic Alliances at KUKA. A KR 500 L480-3MT robot picks up cast compo­nents using pneu­matic grip­pers from Zimmer and feeds them to one of the Heller machining centers. After the compo­nents have been drilled and milled, they are deburred by the robot in the outer posi­tion and then removed. To be able to supply both machining centers from a total of four feed stations, the robot is installed on the KL 1500–3 linear unit. Sense­forge from Altran can also be used to specif­i­cally check the temper­a­ture and cooling time of the tools. In networking the produc­tion cell with the CNC machines, KUKA relies on the modern Industry 4.0 archi­tec­ture of the alliance. “In simpli­fied terms, this archi­tec­ture can be described by four levels: Manu­fac­turing Compo­nents (systems), Edge Controller, IIoT- Plat­form and User Inter­face,” Liedtke continues.

The connec­tion to the digital world is made by networking all the compo­nents involved together in the cloud.  “The data is collected in an edge gateway from Fujitsu and passed on to our oper­ator cloud,” reports Bastian Jehl, Indus­trial Internet of Things Solu­tion Engi­neer at KUKA. “Services are then provided in the cloud itself, such as authen­ti­ca­tion, data processing, predic­tive main­te­nance and event eval­u­a­tion. Currently, our workers get an overview of what is happening in the Heller machining centers using 3d Signals,” adds Jehl. Using the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance archi­tec­ture set up, the data runs via MQTT broker over the customer’s own cloud. The customer will tailor the selec­tion and presen­ta­tion of data from a wide variety of sources to their needs using appro­priate dash­board tools. “The customer has data sover­eignty and decides how the data flows,” Jehl said.

DIGITAL TWIN INCREASES PROJECT BENE­FITS

The “digital twin” also plays a role in the project contri­bu­tion of Alliance member SAP: The data of the phys­ical product ulti­mately becomes view­able and analyz­able as a digital twin in the KUKA cloud. Users can access the twin via the SAP Asset Intel­li­gence Network (AIN), where docu­men­ta­tion, certifi­cates and main­te­nance instruc­tions are stored in addi­tion to the twin. The Open Industry 4.0 Alliance explains the bene­fits of the SAP AIN: A manu­fac­turer makes its master data avail­able for a specific model. Customers using the same machine simply adopt it and link it to their existing data.

The 3d Signals solu­tion from Israel includes a cloud-based solu­tion and an IoT device that applies real-time algo­rithms and AI to auto­mat­i­cally detect machine health and machining process for a variety of machines and processes. Data flows from a Connec­tivity Box device to Fujitsu Edge via KUKA Cloud and ulti­mately to 3d Signals. The 3d Signals cloud presents a dash­board that clearly summa­rizes data and processes in the Heller cell for the user. The special­ists also took over the inte­gra­tion of the Heller machining cells via sensors as Heller is not a member of the alliance.

“With our prod­ucts, we stand for digital trans­for­ma­tion in manu­fac­turing with a focus on rapid deploy­ment, full factory floor coverage and fast ROI for our customers,” says Ofer Affias, Founder & CTO of 3d Signals. The compa­ny’s dash­board solu­tion visu­al­izes real-time data and analytics for the two Heller machines in the shortest possible time through a non-inva­sive and machine-inde­pen­dent instal­la­tion of multi-func­tion sensors. The AI-based asset perfor­mance moni­toring plat­form trans­forms the collected data into action­able insights for Kuka and provides numerous busi­ness intel­li­gence and analytics tools in the cloud.

THE TWO PHASES OF THE PROJECT

In the soft­ware archi­tec­ture as a whole, proto­cols and stan­dards such as OPC-UA and MQTT are used, as well as propri­etary proto­cols at the Fujitsu Edge level. On the cloud computing plat­form Microsoft Azure IoT Edge, the processes are orches­trated and passed on via message bus, the MQTT broker, to other instances, such as the 3d Signals Cloud, Siemens Mind­Sphere and SAP AIN.

The refer­ence project is divided into two phases: The first phase — the complete digi­ti­za­tion of the manu­fac­turing cell according to brown­field aspects during ongoing produc­tion — has been success­fully completed. In the second phase, which is now underway, the processes are being contin­u­ously opti­mized on the basis of prac­tical expe­ri­ence and predic­tive analysis methods.

NETWORKING COMPA­NIES WITH HIGH DIGITAL AFFINITY

The refer­ence project at KUKA vividly demon­strates how part­ners’ compe­ten­cies can be bundled in a targeted manner, thereby achieving very good results. The project impres­sively demon­strates the most impor­tant purpose of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance – namely, to network like-minded indus­trial compa­nies with high digital affinity to opti­mally exploit new syner­gies. This makes a deci­sive contri­bu­tion to effec­tively advancing the Industry 4.0 idea and making prac­ti­cally ready-made digital work­flows avail­able to customers.