Reduced space requirement in mobile machines

For mobile machines, B&R now equips its PC with hyper­vi­sor soft­ware. This allows the PC to serve simul­ta­ne­ous­ly as a high-per­for­mance con­troller and a Win­dows or Lin­ux PC. This allows smart farm­ing appli­ca­tions, for exam­ple, to be imple­ment­ed cost-effec­tive­ly with just one device.

The so-called Gen­er­al Pur­pose Oper­at­ing Sys­tem (GPOS) and the real-time oper­at­ing sys­tem are linked via a vir­tu­al net­work inter­face. For exam­ple, cloud-con­nect­ed Win­dows soft­ware can cal­cu­late the opti­mal track of a mobile work­ing machine, while the real-time oper­at­ing sys­tem trans­lates this infor­ma­tion into spe­cif­ic com­mands to the dri­ves. Com­bin­ing two oper­at­ing sys­tems in one device reduces costs. Space require­ments are reduced and the avail­able hard­ware resources are bet­ter utilized.

Option board for external I/O connection

B&R also offers a new option board for con­nect­ing exter­nal I/O mod­ules or sen­sors in com­bi­na­tion with the Hyper­vi­sor soft­ware. It is equipped with three CAN and one real-time POWERLINK interface.

Standardized communication

To fur­ther net­work the PC with­in the mobile work­ing machine, the com­pa­ny is pro­vid­ing anoth­er option board with four addi­tion­al Eth­er­net inter­faces. Exter­nal devices such as GPS receivers or cel­lu­lar modems can thus be con­nect­ed to the PC. The inter­faces already have the Eth­er­net exten­sion TSN and are thus opti­mal­ly pre­pared for the future com­mu­ni­ca­tion stan­dard OPC UA over TSN.