CNC control has been widely used in the manufacturing industry to control various applications of machines such as welding machines, coordinate measuring machines and electronic assembly. Just like all other industries, there has been a lot of improvement in the development of CNC, making it more accurate and safer to operate. However, in the past years, the adoption of the new CNC technologies is very slow. Now, there is a changing trend in the adoption of CNC due to the availability of open-source technologies, resulting in the proliferation of CNC machines at home or small industries.
As a result, machine makers need to continuously look for ways to keep costs down and to increase productivity at the same time. And with the dawn of technology such as the smartphones that place an importance in user-friendly interaction, machine builders also increasingly demand that the machines to be easy to learn and easy to operate. With advances in technology of machining tools, CNC machine makers are also demanded to keep up in order to accommodate more complex applications.
Platform-Based Approach To CNC
Let’s start by drawing a parallel between this to what we saw in the commercial smartphone world. In the past, we have Symbian OS running on exclusively Nokia mobile phones and this was a stable and well-liked product. However this creates inconvenience if and when one user wishes to move to another brand.
Today, we have Android OS (open-source) and iOS (closesource) dominating the smartphone world. Individually they are two separate platforms where Apps can be designed, developed and deployed. This platform-based approach in the commercial world leads to the unlimited possibilities of realisable functions on a smartphone versus a phone of yesteryears where phone calls are about the only capability.
For the industrial world, this same platform-based approach can be taken though I am not suggesting we can be taking a smartphone and running a CNC application on it. By platform-based, we are looking at standard Windows OS running on an Intel-based PC, or the famous Wintel combination since the 1980s. In the broad sense, this can mean any variants of Windows OS running on either x86/x64 or even ARM-based architecture.
On this common Wintel combination, we can select the type of Windows OS and the type of CPU processors, and we also benefit whenever Intel introduces better, faster and often cheaper processors. This effectively enables us to choose and decide a cost-effective hardware/OS setup depending on the complexity of the machine. On top of this Wintel architecture, we will add an industrial software layer to achieve the real-time control and fieldbus communication capability. This completes our platform, and the rest is just about the Apps.
From a design perspective, such platform-based approach to CNC or in a broader sense machine building allows higher performance, flexibility and cost management. From an operations and maintenance standpoint, Apps does not go obsolete unlike proprietary hardware. This protects the long-term capital investment and reduces the operational expenses.
Improving Efficiency, Allowing Retrofitting
It is said that through the use of EtherCAT and Beckhoff TwinCAT on a software-based CNC control solution, one Chinese turret punch press manufacturer managed to achieve a 20 percent performance improvement over their previous solution.
In this particular example, all automation functions in the combined punching and laser cutting line as well as in the equipment for loading and unloading material can be run on one computer. As a result, both the hardware and space requirements as well as system costs are reduced.
One US-headquartered waterjet cutting machine manufacturer equipped a PC-based controller that can cut complex, 3D components precisely and repeatedly onto its five-axis waterjet system. The openness of the PC-based control platform allows the company to retain their existing motors and drive components running on SERCOS II. The complete machine control, including HMI and PLC functions as well as the complex CNC control for execution, is implemented and running on a single Intel Celeron-based C6920 Industrial PC.
New Industry 4.0 Concepts For CNC
Industry 4.0 is an Industry Initiative in Germany, and along with other buzzwords like Internet-of-Things (IoT), Big Data, Cloud, etc, we are at the beginning of a very exciting phase for the industry. Just as I mentioned earlier regarding the limitation of conventional CNC control and increased cost pressure by alternatives and open-source substitutes, a new approach is definitely needed.
Interestingly, Industry 4.0 is anticipating the revolutionary changes that will propel our general industries forward for decades to come, so what can we actually do? On the machine itself, have you considered to use a dynamic dashboard instead of the fixed rotary knobs and dials? How about having a multi-touch display changing according to the exact functions that the operator is using? Such technology is already adopted in the higher-end automotive models.
IoT talks about the intelligence down to the level of machines but it goes beyond Machine-to-Machine communication. If the machine has a Twitter account and is able to tweet its status, then it makes it easy for a maintenance engineer or even another machine to follows its status by simply subscribing to its tweets. There are a lot of possibilities, and now is the time to relook convention CNC control. I am quite sure by the end of this decade, CNC control will look vastly different.
