Robot maker COMAU and automation technology provider B&R have reached a significant milestone in their partnership, with 10,000 COMAU robots now controlled by B&R technology.

The two companies have been working together since 2008 when B&R became the exclusive control system supplier for COMAU’s robot controllers, Derrick Stacey, a solutions engineer with B&R, told Design News in an interview. The companies’ primary work together has been to integrate robotics into production lines so OEMs and end users can benefit from synchronization and the resulting responsiveness of the combined system, he told us.

Stacey said that the significance of the milestone is indeed the level of integration the two companies have achieved between COMAU’s robots and B&R’s automation and control software.

Robot maker COMAU and automation technology provider B&R have been working together since 2008 when B&R became the exclusive control system supplier for COMAU’s robot controllers.
(Source: B&R)

“Our partnership with COMAU allows us to go away from traditional standalone robot controllers and to use a single machine controller to handle the full machine and robot control inside of a single industrial PC, and to program everything inside our Automation Studio programming environment,“ he said.

The COMAU robots controlled by B&R’s system vary in terms of their models and the tasks they can perform, Stacey added.

“All models from COMAU are available for all possible applications,“ he said. "This is a truly a sandbox approach that allows software designers and automation engineers to freely design robots into any application that they see fit. COMAU has some specialized robots for certain applications like palletizing but there is no limitation to their implementation.“

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As the two companies continue their partnership, COMAU can take advantage of development at B&R to expand its technology for tighter synchronization of the entire robotic system and to reduce the time it takes to develop robotic applications, Stacey said.

Elizabeth Montalbano is a freelance writer who has written about technology and culture for more than 15 years. She has lived and worked as a professional journalist in Phoenix, San Francisco, and New York City. In her free time she enjoys surfing, traveling, music, yoga, and cooking. She currently resides in a village on the southwest coast of Portugal.

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