FANUC Intelligent Edge Link & Drive system, the open platform connects various devices across manufacturers for analysis and improvement of your production data.
The American news service "Robotics & Automation" announced it last year: Fanuc is developing an "App Store" for its FIELD platform. FIELD stands for Fanuc Intelligent Edge Link and Drive and is based on open standards. The concept could already be seen in the first presentations of the platform. First applications like ZDT and Linki already exist and are in industrial use.
Another app, the operation management software "MT-Linki", is used in machine tools with FANUC CNC controls. With FIELD technology, "MT-Linki" records and monitors machine tool characteristics, monitors and analyzes their "life functions", detects production and machine problems at an early stage in order to carry out preventive maintenance measures in good time.
All FIELD functions work with or are based on very large amounts of data. A cloud, which can be accessed by all participants in a production environment, for example, is regarded as a proven means of storage ("big data"). In order to make this access more selective, FANUC and Cisco have introduced a Factory Internet Cloud and call it Fog for simplicity's sake. This internal Fog stores significantly less data, so that the data from machines, robots or applications generated in Edge Computing is quickly available at the process level.
In the future, systems such as FIELD will have to be open to all machines involved in the production process. Although FANUC itself still uses proprietary interfaces for its own products such as Robodrill, Robocut, Laser or Robot (which has kept functional reliability enormously high to date), it will also support third-party controllers via OPC servers. Thus it will be possible to connect third-party products to a FIELD system.
