MULTI-BRAND INTEGRATION IN ROBOTIC SYSTEMS: STRATEGIES FOR HARMONIZING DIFFERENT PLATFORMS IN INDUSTRIAL ENVIRONMENTS

Abstract

Industrial plants increasingly operate robotic fleets composed of equipment from multiple manufacturers, driven by mergers and acquisitions, capacity expansions, application-specific niches, and the growing adoption of collaborative robots alongside conventional industrial arms. This chapter examines multi-brand integration as a structural engineering condition rather than a transitory problem to be eliminated. It compares the programming languages, simulation environments, controller architectures, and market positioning of ABB, FANUC, KUKA, Yaskawa/Motoman, and Universal Robots, and characterizes the challenges that manufacturer diversity introduces across five interdependent layers: programming, industrial communication, maintenance, regulatory and safety compliance, and organizational knowledge management. Building on this diagnosis, the chapter presents complementary strategies for standardizing programming conventions, adopting multi-brand offline-programming and simulation tools, exploring software-abstraction frameworks such as ROS-Industrial, and establishing change-governance and cross-training practices. Particular attention is given to the OPC UA for Robotics companion specification as a vendor-neutral interoperability layer, supported by field-measured latency and performance evidence from recent engineering literature, alongside the regulatory implications of the revised ISO 10218-1:2025 and ISO 10218-2:2025 standards and IEC 62443 cybersecurity guidance. A structured six-phase methodology for implementing and expanding multi-brand cells is proposed, followed by illustrative scenarios demonstrating gains in flexibility, maintenance efficiency, and international scalability. The chapter concludes that multi-brand integration competence should be regarded as a strategic asset that broadens engineering’s freedom of choice, rather than a necessary evil to be tolerated only when single-brand standardization becomes impractical.