**Minutes of the 6th RIA/NIST Workshop on\
Open Architecture Control in Robotics**

Tuesday June 4 2002

Applied Manufacturing Technologies, Inc.

Orion, MI

This was the sixth meeting in the series of open architecture robotics
workshops sponsored by the Robotic Industries Association (RIA) and the
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Attendees and
their affiliations are listed in Attachment 1.

The meeting began with a review of the R15.04-1 Technical Report on Wave
1 communications standards. At the last meeting, Fred Proctor was tasked
with writing a Foreword, which is now in the report. Today the group was
asked to review this and if no changes are suggested, the report will go
into Committee balloting, and then formal balloting per ANSI procedures.
Two months are estimated for the ANSI balloting process.

**Action: Jeff Fryman will convene the R15.04 Committee for final edits
and voting, then prepare the approved report for ANSI balloting.**

The group discussed Bill Kneifel's email on the M12 Ethernet connector,
which was initiated after ARC's announcement on the ProfiNet connector
(see Attachment 2). Claude Dinsmoor said that the connector is not yet
an issue with robot controllers, since the cable connection is made
inside the robot controller. The M12 connector will become relevant when
the group considers Ethernet for device I/O. Experts in the group
explained the IEC numbering scheme (e.g., IP20, IP65, IP67) appearing in
the ARC report as referring to connector dust- and moisture protection.
BCIT has a document describing "The Ethernet Connector Wars" at
http://www.tc.bcit.ca/gait/iel/Ethernet%20Connectors.doc.

Technical report marketing was discussed next. In April 2000, GM and
Ford got together and worked out a common vision for robot controller
communication interfacing. Since that time, Ford purchasing has had
second thoughts about added costs. Since buyers don't get credit for
reduced integration costs later, there is no motivation for them to
recommend anything that would add purchase cost. However, GM does order
Ethernet with all robots. What did GM do to convince their buyers? In
GM's case the buyers understand maintenance costs. Furthermore, disaster
recovery is a required feature. We need to present a "downtown business
case" that makes clear the benefits of standard communication
interfaces. This is difficult since it's a cost avoidance, not a cost
savings. The group considered if the National Coalition for Advanced
Manufacturing (NACFAM) could help, since they represent top-level
management and prepare business case documents. The group believed that
we should develop the business case first, and then pursue how to make
the case through NACFAM, grass roots campaigns, or other methods. The
group agreed that we need to get real numbers for maintenance and
disaster recovery costs. GM and Ford offered to track down these numbers
for their operations. This information may be company proprietary, but
we will try to prepare them so as not to divulge sensitive information.
Jim Heaton noted that their suppliers are given a contractual cost if
their systems cause a shutdown, e.g., \$10,000/minute. We need to
determine how much of these costs could be mitigated if the Technical
Report recommendations were adopted. Also noted was the fact that IT
infrastructure needs to be in place for the most cost effectiveness. In
facilities gridded with switched Ethernet already, cost is minimized.
Fred Proctor noted that the supply chain interoperability study
sponsored by NIST arrived at a figure of \$1 billion annually to
overcome non-interoperability in the U.S. automotive supply chain.

**Action: Dave Gravel, Jim Heaton will obtain cost figures for
maintenance and disaster recovery.**

**Action: Fred Proctor will put the supply chain interoperability report
on the web.**

Jeff Fryman noted that the RIA Annual Forum would be a good place to get
the word out on the report, and to present benefits figures to the
management-level attendees. It's too late to put a new item on the
presentation agenda, but a poster session is possible.

**Action: Jeff Fryman will look into a poster session at the fall RIA
forum on the benefits of robot control communication standards.**

Earlier, Fred Proctor circulated a writeup on open architecture benefits
used by the NIST Director's Office to show the impact of NIST work to
Congressional representatives. In the writeup, integration costs were
stated to be two to four times the robot purchase cost. The group
disputed this amount, which originated from discussions at the 1999 RIA
Forum but were not attributable. It was thought that this figure must
have included tooling, safety hardware, and other costs that full
adoption of the Technical Report recommendations would not reduce. We
need to extract the information management component for this to be a
meaningful measure. Victoria Livschitz commented that information
management flexibility enables change management and evolution of the
production line, not just program upload/download/compare but loading
new programs. This is an additional benefit to the more obvious UDC
benefits. These numbers may be obtained through RIA vendor members and
third parties. Ross Rawlings noted that the value of software sold by
companies like Radix and MDT to overcome point-to-point interoperability
problems would show the magnitude of the problems. Ross believed that
this n-squared complexity of point-to-point solutions makes his job more
difficult, and has limited the market.

**Action: Ross Rawlings will obtain benefits estimates stemming from the
third-party sector.**

Dave Gravel reported that he met recently with ABB, a major supplier of
robots to Ford. Dave asked if we thought he should encourage ABB to
participate in this group. The group thought so.

**Action: Dave Gravel will encourage ABB to participate in this working
group.**

On the subject of a roadmap for our activities, Claude Dinsmoor
suggested that we spin off a small marketing group to do
public-relations work, e.g., articles in Control Engineering magazine.
Fred Proctor recalled the vendor support letter he drafted for the RIA
Committee, stating support for the Technical Report recommendations, and
asked that this group review the letter to see if it would be applicable
to their activities.

**Action: Claude Dinsmoor and Jeff Fryman will generate a plan for the
marketing group, which would include these two plus Dave Gravel and Jim
Heaton.**

**Action: Jim Heaton will enlist Clif Triplett and Jim Wells from GM to
do proselytizing.**

We revisited the roadmap for the three-wave standards rollout. Here is
the current matrix:

+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+
| **Wave 1**            | **Wave 2**            | **Wave 3**            |
+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+
| *Program Upload,      | *Centralized          | *Network Management   |
| Download and Compare* | Configuration: remote | Capabilities*         |
|                       | address               |                       |
|                       | administration and    |                       |
|                       | determination;        |                       |
|                       | disaster recovery;    |                       |
|                       | time synchronization  |                       |
|                       | (\~1 sec, for file    |                       |
|                       | date/time)*           |                       |
+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+
| > Ethernet 10/100, RJ | > DNS                 | > SNMP/MIB-II         |
| > 45 connector        |                       |                       |
+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+
| > TCP/IP              | > BOOTP/DHCP client   | *Data Abstraction and |
|                       |                       | Presentation*         |
+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+
| > FTP                 | > ARP                 | > HTTP                |
+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+
|                       | > UDP/TFTP            | > HTML                |
+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+
|                       | > NTP (or others as   | > XML                 |
|                       | > appropriate)        |                       |
+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+
|                       |                       | *Real-Time            |
|                       |                       | Communication over    |
|                       |                       | Ethernet*             |
+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+
| **Timing: now**       | > **Timing: 2002**    | **Timing: after Wave  |
|                       |                       | II**                  |
+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+

Descriptive categories were added (e.g., Centralized Configuration,
Network Management Capabilities) and entries were moved across waves to
be consistent with the categorizations.

**Action: Fred Proctor will put this table on the web site.**

**Action: Jeff Fryman will charge R15.04 Committee with writing a draft
for the Wave II Technical Report.**

James Gilsinn made a presentation on Ethernet/IP performance metrics.
This presentation gave a basic overview of conformance testing vs.
performance testing and why both are needed. It then presented an
overview of the 5th Ethernet/IP Implementor's Workshop held May 22, 2002
in Ann Arbor, MI. This meeting consisted of discussions on IP address
configuration methods, performance requirements and benchmarking, and
the interoperability demonstrations. The IP address configuration
methods were centered on a discussion of DHCP vs. BootP and how to
perform disaster recovery on devices. During the performance
requirements and benchmarking topic, Rockwell Automation and BCIT made
presentations on metrics and tests for Ethernet/IP. A sub-group
consisting of personnel from Rockwell, BCIT, NIST, GM, and Woodhead was
created to come up with a basic set of metrics before the next meeting
on July 10-11, 2002. The workshop interoperability demonstration is
meant to show how Ethernet/IP components can work together seamlessly.
The demonstrations will consist of three robotic workcells, not
necessarily coordinated, with additional equipment all running
Ethernet/IP. Demonstrations are planned for 2003, starting in Q1. After
the overview of the workshop, James presented some suggestions on
performance metrics and tests based on all the work up to this point.
The presentation is available on the web site,
http://www.isd.mel.nist.gov/projects/openarch/past.html, under "6th
RIA/NIST Workshop on Open Architecture Control in Robotics" as the
"Real-Time Ethernet Performance Measures" link.

Regarding benchmarking, Gary Workman said that the existing benchmarking
RFCs apply to interconnect devices like switches, hubs and routers, not
end devices like a robot controller. Claude Dinsmoor noted that
closed-loop, action-oriented tests would be the most meaningful for
robot controllers. This subject came up in discussions with BCIT, in
which the time between request for a device action and the action itself
is the relevant measure.

A Wave III whiteboarding activity ensued, in which the proposed Wave III
interfaces (HTTP, HTML, XML, and SNMP/MIB-II) were considered as
enabling technologies and further categorized and prioritized as
follows:

Group 1

-   Annunciation

-   Diagnostics

-   Data Management

Group 2a

-   Data Abstraction

-   Data Modeling

Group 2b

-   Data Presentation

-   Unified Controller

Group 3

-   Real-Time Communications

-   QoS Implicit

-   QoS Explicit

Group 4

-   Pass-Through (Real-Time & Non-Real-Time Bridge to I/O Network)

Group 5

-   Security

-   Access Control

-   Authentication

The IDA specification and the Robot Companion Standard to MMS were
thought to be useful for comparison. The MMS companion standard includes
much of what we expect to see in the XML schema for robot controller
information. Also relevant is the work of the RIA R15.07 Simulation and
Off-Line Programming committee.

**Action: Fred Proctor will make the IDA specification and the Robot
Companion Standard to MMS available.**

**Action: Jeff Fryman will contact Craig Battles of R15.07 and obtain
information from them relevant to our group.**

The next meeting is tentatively scheduled for September 2002, a change
from November as discussed in the meeting due to scheduling conflicts
with RIA.

Attachment 1: Attendees:

  ------------- ------------ ---------------------------------------------
  **First       **Last       **Company**
  name**        name**       

  Craig         Snyder       Applied Manufacturing Technologies

  Jim           Huber        Product Development

  Claude        Dinsmoor     FANUC Robotics North America

  David         Gravel       Ford Motor Company

  Gary          Workman      General Motors

  Andrew        Hamor        General Motors Corporation R&D Center

  Jim           Heaton       General Motors Corporation R&D Center

  William       Kneifel      Kuka Development Laboratories

  James         Gilsinn      NIST/ISD

  Fred          Proctor      NIST/Intelligent Systems Division

  Nikola        Dimitrov     Radix Controls

  Ross          Rawlings     Radix Controls Inc.

  Jeff          Fryman       Standards Development

  David         Naylor       Starthis

  Stephan       Werges       Starthis

  Victoria      Livschitz    Sun Microsystems
  ------------- ------------ ---------------------------------------------

Attachment 2: ARC Announcement of PROFInet connector from ARC May 31,
2002 Newsletter:

Industrial Ethernet Connectors Specified for PROFInet

PROFIBUS International, the umbrella organization devoted to promoting
PROFIBUS and related networks, recently announced its physical layer
intentions for the Ethernet-based PROFInet network. Like most other
industrial ethernet protocols currently on the market, the PROFInet
solution relies on the commercial grade RJ45 connector for use in IP20
environments. For IP65 and IP67 environments, however, the organization
is specifying the round, sealed M12 connector or an RJ45-compatible "RJ
Industrial" connector that is compatible with standard housings.

ARC Vice President Chantal Polsonetti says, "while Industrial Ethernet
promises to bring a common network physical layer to the plant floor,
the COTS RJ45 connector associated with commercial-grade Ethernet is
just not acceptable in some manufacturing environments or to some
manufacturing customers. Conversely, the need for industrialized
connectors that can operate in IP65 and IP67 environments can ultimately
negate the benefits of a common physical layer as various industrial
Ethernet groups pursue their own solutions. This announcement regarding
PROFInet eliminates one area of uncertainty regarding their connector
plans as we await commercial availability of Version 1.1 of this
currently non real-time industrial Ethernet protocol."