PLC program for Industrial Robot control

Hello People,
I am a student and doing Master Thesis. I want to learn PlC programming (Structured Text) preferably Beckhoff or Siemens for Industrial Robot control (eg pick and place operation, packaging etc) where can I find suitable course. Please suggest. Thanks in advance.
Ishani Vaidya
 
I don't know what you could write about that would be worthy of a Master Thesis. PLCs are tools. Tools change. What is valuable is the underlying knowledge like math and physics that will never change. What would you have written about 10 years ago or 20 years ago? Structured text is yet another programming language. What can structured text do that other programming languages can't?

If I were doing research for a thesis I would look into PLC doing parallel processing. PLCs were designed to abstract hard wired relays and coils that all ran or operated simultaneously. The hard wired ladders had no scan. Future PLCs can approach this again using CPUs with CUDA cores. The nvidea jetson nano is cheap and has many CUDA cores that could execute many rungs of ladder in parallel. I have a GTX graphics card with 2560 CUDA cores. It would be ground breaking figuring out how to get these cores to execute ladder rungs in parallel.

Even more extreme would be figuring out how to use an FPGA to execute rungs in parallel.
 
The above reminds me working for a small company in the 1980’s. They built a massive machine with lots of moving arms and hydraulic rams - all controlled from one of Alllen Bradley’s first PLC. After a very successful factory test, a mechanical engineer proficient in ‘Basic’ asked if the behemoth could be controlled from his ZX80 (pre-Sinclair Spectrum) The answer was ‘yes, but you wouldn’t’ !
We used common sense in those days - nowadays Regulations would in most countries would stop you ...

Having excessive computational power is not the answer.
 
Having very fast application code scans are not the answer either - been there and done it !

Modern high end PLC’s are multi - CPU machines with only a fraction of the services supporting solving the logic of the application code. A lot is connected with comms. and data handling but most concerns error handling - the PLC spends most of it’s time checking it’s own integrity.

As for programming languages, Siemens have been using a form of statement logic through all of it’s S5 and S7 series PLC’s. Although evolution has done it’s bit (in the last 20 years or so) they basically run a program where the user can pull in subroutines to suit the application.
 
Hi I finished my recent project on PLC programming for robot application for simple pick and place using s7 1200 PLC programming with FBD -functional block diagram .
 
A X-Y pick and place is not worthy of a Master's thesis.
I just bought nvidia jetson xavier AGX just to learn and find out what I and the Jetson can do. One of the questions I was asked is could a put EtherCat on that. I think yes.
It has CUDA cores for video processing and tensor cores for AI. This is relatively new.
A question I like to ask is what can I do with this that I can't do with that.
I will find out. I am retired but want to know.
 
Top