PLC & cell control
Cell controller
The supervisory PLC or industrial PC that coordinates robots, conveyors, sensors, and safety devices as one production cell rather than isolated machines.
A cell controller sits above the individual robot and machine controllers, sequencing job requests, tracking part status, and arbitrating shared resources like a common conveyor or fixture between multiple robots. It is usually a standard PLC such as ControlLogix or S7-1500, though some cells use an industrial PC running custom software instead.
The interface between the cell controller and each robot needs a defined handshake protocol, typically over a fieldbus like EtherNet/IP or PROFINET, covering job start, completion, fault reporting, and recipe or program selection.
Well-designed cell control logic isolates each robot's internal fault handling from the overall cell sequence, so a single station's alarm can pause its own operation without necessarily stopping every robot in the cell.
Related integrations
Common questions
- What does Cell controller do?
- The supervisory PLC or industrial PC that coordinates robots, conveyors, sensors, and safety devices as one production cell rather than isolated machines.
- What does Cell controller work with?
- It works with EtherNet/IP, PROFINET, SCADA link, MES integration.
- What should I watch for with Cell controller?
- Handshake protocol design directly affects cell reliability. Fault isolation between stations needs deliberate logic design. Adding or removing a station later requires reworking the sequence logic.