Secure Sharing of Robot and Manufacturing Resources in the Cloud for Research and Development

Cloud systems are nowadays more and more present in industry, being part of Industry 4.0 solutions; this can be seen at production level, in manufacturing systems and in robotics. Cloud services are used to improve and interconnect the manufacturing shop-floor processes with the higher-level enterprise components (enterprise resource planning systems, logistics, supply chains and other operational systems). The paper presents a solution for cloud – manufacturing system integration where the cloud system is used to remotely access and control a manufacturing system for research, development and training purpose. The access to the manufacturing system is configured in the cloud as a service, the connection to the manufacturing system being implemented through a set of virtual machines which are deployed and custom configured in cloud. The paper describes the architecture of the system, the deployment scenarios and presents the limitations and performances of the system obtained during the tests.