Industrial robot connector driver for machine interfacing in GitHub project

Flexxbotics has updated its FANUC industrial robot connector driver within the Flexxbotics Transformers open-source project on GitHub. The improved FANUC connector driver expands robot-to-machine interfacing interoperability, real-time robot awareness, and secure bi-directional control across automated production environments and advanced robotic workcells.

The updated FANUC transformer is available now as part of the Flexxbotics open-source repository at github.com/Flexxbotics/transformers

Industrial robots are central to modern manufacturing, however, interfacing between robot controllers and the many different protocols used in factory machines, safety systems, inspection and test equipment, and other plant assets remains a complicated, custom project.

Now with the updated connector driver, the company further modernises robot connectivity by enabling FANUC robots to communicate in a standardised way with over 1000 makes and models of factory equipment using a SDA runtime designed for scalable, many-to-many interoperability.

The company's updated connector driver allows the full line of FANUC industrial robots and collaborative robots with expanded capabilities including:

• Standardised interoperability of FANUC robots across both open industrial protocols and vendor-specific proprietary interfaces
• Secure bi-directional read/write execution for closed-loop robotic cell automation
• Additional real-time robot awareness of the operational states and process variables of factory machines and equipment
• High-frequency, parallelised data pipelines capture more data, including robot speeds, force, torque, cycle, performance, and other telemetry

"Robotic automation has historically required custom point-to-point integration in every workcell and process," said 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 connector driver interoperates with all the plant equipment connected to the runtime – robots can communicate directly with different brands of PLCs, factory machines, safety systems, inspection equipment, cameras, probes, sensors, and others across all endpoints regardless of their protocols.

Each new machine added inherits compatibility across the entire automation environment, eliminating custom point-to-point robot integrations and enabling many-to-many bi-directional communication across heterogeneous factory assets.

Using asynchronous, multi-threaded controls, the FANUC transformer aggregates and contextualises robotic data in real time to support advanced orchestration, closed-loop control, and granular data collection for Physical AI training and inference.

"Open interoperability is essential for scaling robotics beyond isolated workcells," noted Tyler Bouchard, CEO and co-founder of Flexxbotics. "By providing our FANUC connector driver as open source, we're giving manufacturers a production-ready foundation for building truly autonomous robotic factories."