Abstract
Many remote monitoring systems are proposed from machine tools vendors and robot vendors. However, these remote monitoring systems are usually dependent on individual machine tool vendors or robot vendors.
On the other hand, conventional monitoring methods are indicating of camera images and control information to personal computers. However, there are monitoring limitations of network cameras because of lighting problems and/or the installation limitations of the cameras.
Therefore, 3-D remote monitoring system (3-D LIVE or 3-D Layered Information Viewing Environment) for multi-vendor manufacturing systems was developed. The 3-D LIVE uses ORiN (Open-Robot Interface for the Network), which is a de facto standard for accessing the robot system information for gathering information data at the multi-vendor device level consisting of robot controllers and machine tool's NCs. The 3-D LIVE manages information from the whole manufacturing line level to the device level of manufacturing systems by using linked multi-media data consisting of 3-D modeling, network camera's pictures and character's data. Then the 3-D LIVE can provide a visual monitoring environment, which is easy to understand for remote operators.
In this paper describes a configuration of the 3-D LIVE. A development of a prototype and results of test operation of the system are discussed.
