RobotStudio as large scale simulation tool

Keke

Hi!

Virtual commissioning and the idea of virtual factories is getting popular among our customers and RobotStudio users. I was just wondering if RobotStudio is intended to be a tool for large scale factory simulations in the future. Currently it seems that RS is capable of doing cell sized simulations but production line is already at the limit. One example of this is a system integrator who wanted to make a Food&Beverage packaging line simulation with RS. The simulation had "only" 5 robots and less than 10 other machinery as Smart Components. The product count however was really high because the line was packaging small candy into boxes and the boxes went to pallets at the end. There were several hundreds if not thousands of dynamic parts moving in the simulation and RS started to get slow even on high performance PCs. They wanted to show the line in Virtual Reality environment so they wanted to use fairly detailed models and advanced lighting. I know that RS is not particularly desgned for this kind of use case but some customers are starting to expect this kind of possiblities if we say that RobotStudio is also a sales tool. And I have understood that in the future RS is going to be used as a platform for simulating ABB PLCs, drives and other machines that are programmed with Automation Builder. I just hope that the software's performance is improved in the future if this is the case. It would be nice if RS was truly scalable and we didn't need to use other simulation software for large scale projects.

Best Regards,

Keijo Hannula, ABB Robotics Finland

labu

Agreed, it is definitely a use case as it would allow to promote more efficiently our solutions to our customers.

robasrobcan

Yes, the performance is going down very fast with every object or SmartComponent. I think it would be a great deal for RobotStudio to "disable" SCs with code behind that are not quite in use to improve overall performance!

Maybe a second way would be to improve the 3D-Engine with more efficent code / faster algorithms, not just put more features in.

Browsem

i have actually done this. linking the simulation to a siemens plc, having 2 robot controllers . the result wasnt that convincing