Rockwell Automation Chairman and CEO Blake Moret says: "Industrial companies are looking for ways to integrate robotics into their operations for process optimization and agility. To achieve this goal, the two companies want to simplify the programming and lifecycle management of robotics.

Engineers will be able to program their entire machine in a single environment, with Comau robotic arms controlled directly by Rockwell Automation's Logix-based controllers. Rockwell Automation's Studio 5000 automation system development software is designed to eliminate the time-consuming and often difficult task of trying to coordinate traditional separate machine control and robotic systems to work with different software tools.

By leveraging digital engineering tools such as Rockwell's Emulate 3D Digital Twin software - which creates digital models of production lines, automatically generates machine control codes and has built-in deployment capabilities for Comau robots - development and deployment capabilities are provided for machine builders, system integrators and others.

The combined Rockwell and Comau solutions also offer benefits beyond better integration. For example, end users can leverage analytics and digital twin tools to gain deeper insight into machine performance and potential production optimization. They can also use protection and security solutions to reduce business risks.

Users deploying Rockwell's FactoryTalk software package in the manufacturing environment benefit from seeing both plant and robot control systems on a single operator interface. Plant and field technicians only need to familiarize themselves with one architecture to monitor both systems. They can also use Rockwell's augmented reality (AR) tools to improve uptime and the maintenance cycle.