Universal Robots and Siemens PLC join hands to create a new era of seamless automation

Shanghai, China, April 25, 2024

Universal Robots has been working tirelessly to automate global enterprises and accelerate its vision of "automation for anyone, anywhere."

Universal Robots (UR), a global collaborative robot manufacturer, announced that its software platform has successfully integrated the Standard Robot Command Interface (SRCI) . This innovative move makes UR the first collaborative robot supplier in the industry to offer this feature.

SRCI is an innovative standard in the field of robot manufacturing. It aims to provide a unified interface between programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and robots . By fully integrating SRCI with the UR series software, the interactive capabilities of the UR collaborative robot can be significantly improved and seamlessly integrated with Siemens PLCs. Currently, Siemens is the first PLC supplier in the automation market to support SRCI.

Daniel Friedman, Global Director of Strategic Partnerships at Universal Robots , said: “Through seamless integration with Siemens PLCs, Universal Robots can provide partners and customers with faster integration and greater ease of operation. Whether for existing or potential customers, we are committed to simplifying our customers’ collaborative robot automation processes and ensuring that automation technology is easy to access and use for anyone, anywhere. This also marks another important step towards the popularization of our automation solutions.”

SRCI's unified cross-manufacturer data interface provides interoperability for collaborative robots and redefines and unifies instructions with Siemens PLCs. This simplifies the robot deployment process, making it faster and easier, and easily integrated into the existing Siemens ecosystem production line.

Universal Robots seamlessly integrate with Siemens PLC (Image source: Siemens)

“We are very pleased that UR’s collaborative robots can now be controlled via SRCI and programmed by SIMATIC users,” said Rolf Heinsohn, Senior Vice President of Siemens Factory Automation . “Our goal is to accelerate factory automation and expand the use of robots in industry by simplifying the use of robots and making them easy to learn and operate for all customers’ employees. For customers, being able to easily integrate UR’s robots with Siemens PLCs and use them in their production lines is undoubtedly a huge advantage.”

The SRCI technology interface is now available for the Universal Robots e-series collaborative robots, as well as the new generation of UR20 and UR30 collaborative robots. Users can install and activate SRCI through the PolyScope control software version 5.15 or later, with the URcap plug-in.