[cs702]

After reading this, I'm persuaded this space would benefit greatly from having a few dominant open-source software frameworks and a few dominant open-source hardware standards, making product support and new-hire onboarding much easier for vendors of all sizes. Alas, I recognize that no established vendor in the space would ever want to see the emergence of industry standards. :-P

[LeifCarrotson]

It definitely would. RoboDK is one product that is moving in the right direction.

In the PLC space, Beckhoff controllers using commodity x86/64 hardware and standardized IEC 61131 programming languages are gobbling up Rockwell and Siemens' market share.

Given they're perpetually about 20 years behind the times, perhaps this year someone at Fanuc, ABB, Kuka, and Yaskawa will catch up to the year 2002 and read Spolsky's admonition [1] that says:

> Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.

Stop trying to turn every division of your company into its own product center. I loathe paying $800/year to Rockwell for the privilege of reading "update your firmware" (and subsequently bricking my controller as an unwilling beta tester) on TechConnect. They're a PLC vendor, they should focus on selling PLC hardware, not making their customers hate them by nickel-and-diming them for software licenses and support contracts. They were down for FOUR DAYS this weekend for planned maintenance. FOUR DAYS!

Likewise, Fanuc should focus on selling servos and castings - robotic manipulator hardware - and stop trying to get the training division to turn a profit. If, instead of a 40 hour course costing $2,000, it was free, there would be more people able to use their $40,000 robot arms! If Roboguide software was free instead of $2,650, clients could more efficiently build more robot cells, and sell more yellow paint! Gah!

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

[mncharity]

> IEC 61131 programming languages

A very brief search turned up assorted overviews[1][2][3], and a github topic[4]. The PLCopen standard[5] is paywalled - only $400 single user, with low low per-seat multipliers! :/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_61131-3 [2] https://dc-us.resource.bosch.com/media/us/products_13/produc... [3] https://www.controleng.com/articles/which-iec-61131-3-progra... [4] https://github.com/topics/iec61131-3 [5] https://plcopen.org/iec-61131-3

[bismuthcrystal]

What this field really needs is a massive push. The reason it always fail to deliver is that the incentive system is screwed. We need something like a Manhattan project capital allocation to a few very talented people to make progress. Building endless frameworks and trying to get thousands of people to cooperate on high level decision making dooms the whole endeavor. The risk for product development is too high for private industry to take and academia can't deliver products.

[iancmceachern]

What you describe is ROS. The issue is that industrial manufacturers of things like arms or motion controllers all have their own proprietary stuff.

[cs702]

What I describe is what ROS supporters want it to be. As I wrote, no established vendor in the space wants to see the emergence of commodity industry standards. It seems that for the foreseeable future, we're stuck with the status quo.