Heterogeneous Connection and Process Anomaly Detection of Industrial Robot in Intelligent Factory

Since the concept of industry 4.0 was proposed in 2011, the trend of industry 4.0 has been surging around the world. Intelligent factory is one of the main research points in the industry 4.0 era. In order to improve the intelligent level of the factory, the connection-and-cognition ability has to be established for the factory and its equipment. Connection builds data pipes among equipment and systems while cognition automatically turns the data into knowledge. In an intelligent factory, industrial robot plays a leading role. Hence, the aim of this paper is to synthetically study connection and cognition of industrial robots in intelligent factories. To be specific, open platform communications unified architecture (OPC UA) is applied to establish heterogeneous connection of industrial robots with factory management software. A long short-term memory (LSTM) joint auto encoder method is proposed to establish the unsupervised anomaly detection cognition ability for industrial robot process (e.g. grinding, welding and assembling). In summary, this study puts OPC UA and LSTM auto encoder technology together to study heterogeneous connection and process anomaly detection of industrial robots in intelligent factory. The experimental results showed that the proposed method successfully realized heterogeneous connection of an industrial robot and detected process anomaly from the robot built-in sensors’ data.