Java in the factory field

Back to the middle of 2003 I have spent sometime reading and investigating how to use Java in the factory field, based on some standards like Fieldbus, Profibus, Supervisory Systems and so on. It was an early time, a time that I was walking in green fields but without money or contacts to transform the research in something more concrete.

Not that nowadays I have contacts or money, in fact I am not even in the green fields anymore, but looking at my old papers and pdfs I have found those documents. And it brought me some curiosity where was the state of things in this area; back to that time we had a lot of papers, researches but no real implementation in the factory fields itself; it was still the realm of C programmers.

For my disappointment a brief search and inspection proved that Java hadn't stepped forward in most of these areas, but a work demonstration at JavaOne 2007 looked really promising. It is an industry robot automation using merely JAVA, for sure it is using the Real-Time Specification for Java 2.0, as we need a more strict control over what is happening in the machine.
It is used on top of a bus standard called EtherCAT, which is a kind of bus that communicates over Ethernet and not some serial protocol.

The main point here is to see that it is possible to have Java running in a critical environment that needs time based response in a preemptive mode. By the way if you want to see the robot in action just go for this video World's First Java-Controlled Industrial Robot



For those that want to remember about industrial bus here is collection of wiki pages that could helpful:
- Fieldbus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fieldbus)
- EtherCat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EtherCAT)
- Profibus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROFIBUS)

And finally the paper Using Real-time Java for Industrial Robot Control that has an overview about the robot implementation with java.

I hope you enjoy it as a new curiosity area or make you remember old hard working days!