March 2003Fieldbus & Industrial Networking
Access Control & Identity Management
As creators of one of the original fieldbus (CAN), which many others took as a base for their own fieldbus systems or customised versions, Bosch Rexroth has been active in the forefront of the developments in fieldbus communication technology since the very early stages. Not only has it improved its own fieldbus and adapted to the various demands of the different industries, but also incorporated other fieldbus systems into its products and been directly involved in the development of these other fieldbus systems. Today, Bosch Rexroth is known just as well for its range of Profibus and other fieldbus enabled products, as it was for the high-speed CAN bus it first developed in 1986 for the automotive industry.
The philosophy at Bosch Rexroth has always been to keep its products open to communication with other control systems and products, making them more universal and able to integrate with other automation products that may be the end users preference. This has proved itself as particularly practical in the fieldbus environment, where the company has adapted its fieldbus products to talk to almost all the other fieldbus protocols, making it easy to integrate its products into any control system. Bosch Rexroth PLCs for example, have been released for each major fieldbus (CANopen, Profibus-DP, Inter-BUS-S or DeviceNet), enabling the end user to integrate it into an existing system of that particular bus or choose the bus he prefers for a new installation. This has been taken a step further in the development of I/O gateways, which can translate from one fieldbus to another, enabling multi fieldbus communication within one system.
A good example of this was put into practice recently by Flexible Electronic Systems (FES). An existing diamond press system, using Alan Bradley PLCs, where the press was being fed manually, was upgraded through the installation of a Bosch Scara robot to pick and place the blank pellet as well as the finished product. "The Robot's controller, called Rho, uses Profibus-DP whereas the Alan Bradley PLCs use DeviceNet. In order to integrate the robot into the system the two had to exchange certain I/O information. "FES connected a Bosch I/O Gateway to the Alan Bradley DeviceNet chain, and then connected the same I/O Gateway to a Profibus-DP B~IO extension module on the Rho's node chain...and Voila the two were speaking to each other. The more languages you can speak, the better you can understand the world you are in and the easier it will be to succeed wherever you are. Man or PLC, the principle remains the same," said Guenter Schmitz, Director of FES.
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