“Traditionally, industrial robots, motion controllers, and PLCs were programmed separately. PLCs are programmed in ladder logic; motion controls with their wide range are programmed using a PC library or other proprietary language; and industrial robots are programmed in complex proprietary languages that are difficult for non-technical personnel to understand,” said Bharath Kanniappan, one of Technavio’s lead analysts for automation research.

“Therefore, end-users are demanding robots, motion controllers, and PLC to be programmed in familiar PLC languages, so that it can be easily understood by machine builder programmers and maintained by end-user's service personnel.”

As automation applications continue to grow, two distinct areas of industrial control systems, namely robotics and motion are merging in terms of deployments. Robotics is a path dependent on event-based application.

Motion control is typically a scan-based velocity or positioning application. The user interface in robotics is teach-pendent centric, and motion control uses programming methods such as ladder logic and FBD.