Object-Oriented Control Systems on Standard Hardware

We introduce an object-oriented design of a universal control system based on standard hardware like workstations or PCs. This system supports the control of industrial devices such as robot arms, Cartesian systems or I/O units. The new architecture merges the bonds of the traditional control components such as robot controls (RC), numeric controls (NC) or programmable logic controllers (PLC). This concept of a universal control system allows to control an entire industrial production cell consisting of different device types with a single piece of hardware. Moreover the proposed design in general can be used as pattern for the development of object-oriented control systems. According to the introduced architecture various control systems as well as an object-oriented framework have been developed on different platforms (SPARC workstations, Windows NT PCs and industrial PCs).