Flexxbotics has updated the FANUC industrial robot connector driver within its ‘Transformers’ open-source project on GitHub, expanding robot-to-machine interoperability, real-time robot awareness and secure bi-directional control across automated production environments.
The enhanced FANUC connector driver is designed to simplify one of manufacturing’s long-standing challenges: enabling industrial robots to communicate effectively with the wide range of machines, safety systems, inspection equipment and plant assets used across modern factories.
Available now under the permissive Apache 2.0 licence, the updated connector allows FANUC robots and cobots to communicate in a standardised way with more than 1000 makes and models of factory equipment through Flexxbotics’ software-defined automation runtime.
The updated driver delivers standardised interoperability across both open industrial protocols and proprietary vendor interfaces, secure read/write execution for closed-loop robotic cell automation, and improved real-time visibility of machine states and process variables. It also supports high-frequency, parallelised data pipelines, capturing more operational data including robot speed, force, torque, cycle performance and other telemetry to support advanced orchestration, granular data collection and physical AI training.
“Robotic automation has historically required custom point-to-point integration in every workcell and process,” says Tyler Modelski, CTO and co-founder of Flexxbotics. “By further extending our FANUC industrial robot transformer, we’re making connectivity with plant machines and equipment standardised and many-to-many, which enables robotics to scale securely across factories.”
The updated transformer also supports applications that include robotic machine tending, automated job changeovers, cluster orchestration, closed-loop autonomous process control and digital thread traceability for regulatory compliance.
Tyler Bouchard, CEO and co-founder of Flexxbotics, adds: “Open interoperability is essential for scaling robotics beyond isolated work cells. By providing our FANUC connector driver as open source, we’re giving manufacturers a production-ready foundation for building truly autonomous robotic factories.”
More information www.flexxbotics.com
