An industrial robot system based on edge computing: An early experience

As more sensors and actuators are deployed in industrial manufacturing, the industry requires a new production system architecture that offers better real-time and network transmission performance. Yet cloud computing (based on a centralized datacenter) is limited in its possibilities, because it suffers from heavy bandwidth costs and lengthy time delays. As a solution, we propose an industrial robot system based on edge computing. Here, we present its three-layer architecture in detail: the cloud, edge, and physical resource layers. Initially, we deploy an edge node near the data sources, to integrate various devices’ interfaces and acts as a raw data filter. Then, we apply the proposed system on the robotic welding of the membrane wall cell. Finally, we test the system by conducting an experiment. The results demonstrate the system’s feasibility and prove that the system yields better real-time and network transmission performance than a cloud-based scenario.