PERSPECTIVES OF VIRTUAL COMMISSIONING USING ABB ROBOTSTUDIO AND SIMATIC ROBOT INTEGRATOR ENVIRONMENTS: A REVIEW

Due to the high demand for fast equipment development which is one of the main criteria of the ongoing industrial revolution, the evolution of virtual commissioning focused on the testing area of the new equipment and machine without damaging them. In the integration of the robot automation process, 40% of the average cost of implementation is addressed to software and programming development. Due to the many types of programming languages and different robot interfaces, one of the most challenging part of virtual commissioning is to decrease the complexity of implementation due to robot manufacturer variance through unifying these two main criteria. The article reviews and compares virtual commissioning methods in terms of hardware and software components used in the control of the master type elements as PLC and the control of the slave type elements as industrial robots. In the first part, the article reviews the main features of the latest version of ABB Robotstudio, which contains technologies such as virtual meetings, virtual reality, augmented reality, and an express virtual commissioning module. Secondly, the article reviews a new software from Siemens company which is dedicated to virtual commissioning applications, where is necessary to use programable logic controllers from Siemens and industrial robots from different manufacturers such as: Staubli, Denso, Yaskawa, and Kuka.