Fanuc Robot Connectivity using Edge Gateway
Article Type: How-To Audience: Developers, App Admins Module: How To
Fanuc robots provide multiple I/O communication ports that the Edge Gateway can use to read and write controller data.
Connector type: Physical device connector — requires the ModbusTCP or OPC/UA device driver and is added as a device connection on the Edge Gateway.
Important: Be sure that all Ethernet ports are configured to separate networks.
For best results, we suggest using our ModbusTCP or OPC/UA drivers to connect to your Fanuc robots directly.
The Fanuc robots will provide you the ability to address any of the tens of thousands of Modbus registers within the controller, depending on the specific robot model. If you want to use OPC/UA, you'll need to map your holding register tags to the OPC/UA tags within the robot controller. This can be a manual process, unless your controller provides a method to leverage a pre-configuration file that can be imported to set up your variable addressing.
In our testing, OPC/UA works quite well and is highly performant in gathering both read and write of data to the register blocks within the Fanuc robot controller.
There are some nuances with the Fanuc controller, in that browsing is not generally supported. Due to this Fanuc limitation, in order to retrieve tag data from the controller, you will need to update the read request through the OPC/UA server to include the register block you want to get back. Detail on how to address the registers can be found in the attached manuals, or your own manual. If you need additional information, you'll need to contact Fanuc support to acquire your manual — and if you need assistance with figuring out how to configure this, just submit a support ticket to our team.
Note: The original KB article includes an attachment (
HMIDeviceCommunicationOperatorsmanual.pdf). Download it from the original article — the file must be re-attached or linked in this repo.
- Gateway-Deployment-and-Architecture
- How-to-connect-OPC-UA-simulator-to-the-Edge-Gateway
- Modbus-TCP
- Connecting-To-Kepware-OPCUA-Server
Source: support.fuuz.com