Omron marks a new milestone in its history with Sysmac Automation Platform

Omron defines themselves as experts in machinery automation. In fact, most likely the majority of those who know the company to admit this definition. One of its virtues, in addition to the 8% of r & d investment, is its proximity to the customer, an obvious fact in the case of the European market. Its Dutch headquarters is used for the manufacture of products adapted to the demands of European customers and reduces the time of placing on the market of products and tailored developments. Manufacturing and local development facilitate even more quickly and that proximity and increase flexibility. In Hertogenbosch, Omron not only factory, but it has a distribution center and one of r & d. Orientation to European needs and the restructuring of manufacturing were definitive when deciding to continue with this factory in an environment of fierce competition with other lower-cost countries such as China, where Omron also boasts manufacturing plants.

Until here, usual arguments of the departments of marketing, but very precise in the case of Omron and probably the true causes that have allowed to this company launch his platform of automation Sysmac.

The platform Sysmac allows the integral control for all the machine or line of production, provides harmony between human being and machines and has open standards of communication and programming.

If the initial aim when developing the platform was very simple, that was something very fast, the result has been a platform of powerful and robust automation with a new controller of automation of machines (Sysmac NJ) that integrates motion control, sequential logic, communications and inspection with systems of vision, together with a new software (Sysmac Studio) that includes characteristics of configuration, programming, simulation and monitoring, in addition to a network of high speed for machines (EtherCAT) for the control of motion, vision, sensors and actuators, as it explains John go Hooijdonk, director of Marketing of Automation.

Omron Corporation is a company founded in 1933. She has 36,000 employees and its sales amounted to € 5 billion. It invests 8% of its turnover in r & d and has 5,000 patents, to which we must add other 6,000 more pending.

In Europe the company was established in 1974 and currently has 1,500 employees and sales of EUR 500 million. Of them 162,4 million comes from automation systems and 35% of these sales corresponds to products manufactured in Hertogenbosch, employing 285 employees. Omron Industrial Automation products for industrial automation and expert in development of applications, is part of Omron Corporation.

An immediate advantage of the new architecture is the perfect integration of the core competencies of Omron in a single control platform. The machine and motion is controlled from a single point; field devices are controlled by a unique network of machines and are programmed with only software. "Customers design their machines with a control platform and want to expand these machines according to the application, without affecting its speed or performance," said Shinya Yamasaki, general senior director of Omron Automation Systems Division HQ.

"Sysmac is not a product, is a platform," said James Riley, responsible for Marketing Sysmac. And when in Omron refer to a platform, they talk about functions. They want machines to see, be able to predecir… In short, add value.

The heart of the new platform of automation is the controller of machines Sysmac NJ 501, with a design of high speed and flexibility. It is available from October 1, 2011.

Based on the new Intel CPU, it is ideally suited for difficult industrial environments without the need for fan, with a real-time operating system. In addition, it can be extended with a wide variety of 16, 32 or 64-bit CPU. It allows to obtain a response time of less than 1 ms in applications of up to 32 axes. "Something quite unprecedented with conventional hardware-based control," according to James Riley.

Based on an Intel microcontroller, the automation of machines Sysmac NJ driver passes a rigid architecture based on ASIC to a flexible and scalable software-based architecture. "We have taken a big step forward in the world of using Automation PC at the time that we have maintained the legendary reliability and robustness of industrial controllers from Omron." "For this transformation, Omron has worked closely in partnership with Intel, which considers Omron Industrial Automation as its main collaborated in the automation of factories in Japan," said Shinya Yamasaki.

Characteristics of motion of the NJ series

• Control of up to 64 axes
• It meets the of PLCopen motion control function blocks
• Linear, circular and helical interpolation
• Master/slave function: register hardware, flying shear, etc.
• Electronic cam (E-CAM) that allow modification 'on the fly'

“All the world speaks of integration of machines, –signals Riley– but we have centred/centered us in that the integration really improve the day in day out of our customer”. Created to provide to the designers of machines a total control on his systems of automation, Sysmac Studio integrates characteristics of configuration, programming, simulation and monitoring in an only software. Sysmac Studio Provides some authentic surroundings IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to delete the use of different applications of software that do that the design, the development and the validation result complexes. Besides, it uses Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Therefore, it provides a really innovative experience in terms of ease of use and speed of programming.

Given the situation of the industry in Spain at the moment, how does that customers from Omron receive Spain Sysmac launch?

SYSMAC is an innovative platform that will provide the Spanish industry new opportunities to compete better. In situations like the current ones is when investments in innovation contribute more to the industry. Both manufacturers of machinery as end users can obtain direct benefits from the use of the new platform of automation Sysmac.

It is permeable Spanish machine manufacturer to innovations of this kind or tends to be conservative in the equipment of your machines?

The globalization of industries leaves little room for choice machinery manufacturers. The international market is more competitive and the use of technology platforms and Sysmac allows machinery manufacturers provide faster responses to the challenges to be overcome in order to maintain an attractive markets offer. Both cost and functionality, the Sysmac platform provides great flexibility by accelerating development time and optimising the re use of code.

Machine manufacturer today wants to equip his machine with maximum innovation, but maintaining a price that the market will be able to tolerate, in an environment of terrible world competition. To what extent do a production line makes a platform like Sysmac?

The Sysmac platform does not mean a rising costs. On the contrary, knowing the difficulties machinery manufacturers are faced with, the platform is designed to help them become more competitive. We favour the reduction of development costs through an open platform that allows to reuse previous developments or favour reducing the launch costs up through advanced simulation tools. In short, it has been designed taking into account the competitive environment in which our machinery manufacturers are involved.

How important is Spain in the turnover of Omron Europe? What part of this turnover corresponds to Spain?

Traditionally, Spain has always been a country of a relevant weight Omron Europe check-in. Spain integrated in Omron Iberia (Spain and Portugal), has a large team of professional specialists in industrial automation. This dynamic team has always placed Omron as leader in the sector both Spain and Portugal. Even in the current situation of crisis our results have not lost weight in the total number of Omron Europe. Our position in the Spanish market allows us to be always among the three most important countries of Europe. Our contribution to the results of Europe is around 13%.

A feature of the graphical configuration is that it allows a fast installation of the driver, as well as different field devices and networks, at the same time as the programming of the motion and the machine, based on the standard IEC 1131-3, and PLCopen Motion control function blocks, reduce programming time. In addition, an intelligent editor with integrated debugging facilitates rapid and error-free programming. An advanced tool for simulation of motion control and sequential, along with features of registration and tracking of data also reduces the time of installation of the machines. In turn, Sysmac Studio also provides an advanced 3D simulation environment to develop and test profiles motion offline, as in the case of applications with cameras or complex kinematic.

A single connection through Sysmac NJ series driver allows to obtain perfectly integrated with the machine with both the factory control and communication. New NJ series controllers are designed to provide open communication via EtherCAT, the emerging network with greater speed of the market in machinery automation. EtherCAT is the dedicated network of machines of Omron for its wide range of field and motion devices. It is Ethernet industrial network 100Mbps which complies with the IEEE 802.3 format and is capable of handling up to 192 points slaves with a time of up to 100 µs refresh and a lower fluctuation a1µs. achieves high accuracy in the multiaxis thanks to its mechanism of clock synchronization distributed slave. Addition, it is extremely easy to set up thanks to the automatic allocation of points slave address and installation costs very low that use cables and conventional cantilevered Ethernet connectors.