Early Lessons Learned from the Development of a Local OPC UA-based Robotic Testbed for Research

OPC UA has been emerging as a widely-adopted standard in the industry. An OPC UA system represents its resources using an information model. This information model relies on the base OPCUA information model proposed by OPC Foundation, and is extensible with information models from other companion specifications and user-defined information models. When the system specification and design evolve, system developers need to update the information model from the system design. It is tricky for testbeds that frequently are updated with new devices, protocols, and development tools demanded by different use cases. This paper shares our long-term OPC UA-based robotic testbed for Industry 4.0 research and the strategy to develop it. The testbed's development follows the SysML standard for system specification and design and the OPC UA standard for system implementation. Its information model relies on the information models: OPCUA for Devices and VDMA OPC UA for Robotics.