Open-source project accelerates industrial automation interoperability

Flexxbotics has announced the public release of Flexxbotics Transformers, a new open-source project on GitHub providing industrial-grade connector drivers for factory equipment and automation systems. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, Flexxbotics Transformers are designed using software-defined automation (SDA) to accelerate open interoperability across a wide range of manufacturing environments with different tools, machines, and automation. The Flexxbotics Transformers open-source project on GitHub is available now at https://github.com/Flexxbotics/transformers

The products are production-ready connector drivers used with the the company’s SDA platform. They provide a standardised abstraction layer for connecting plant machines, PLCs, robots, inspection and test equipment, sensors, safety systems, and other factory assets using both open industrial protocols and vendor-specific proprietary interfaces.

“Smart factories are moving beyond point-to-point, one-off integrations between assets and equipment to achieve many-to-many interoperability with software-defined automation,” said Tyler Bouchard, CEO and co-founder of Flexxbotics. “By open-sourcing our industrial transformer set, we’re giving controls engineers and automation developers a production-proven option for building more modern factory automation that scales.”

The drivers are loaded directly into the Flexxbotics runtime and expose a consistent interface for communication regardless of the underlying equipment or protocol.

Using parallelised data pipelines with multi-threaded and asynchronous controls, the drivers aggregate and contextualise factory data for greater manufacturing autonomy and Industrial AI data ingestion.

The drivers provide highly reliable and secure controller interoperability across over 1000 makes and models of factory equipment, enabling companies to move beyond incompatibilities and complex, custom point-to-point integrations.

Transformers automatically interoperate with one another within the same Flexxbotics runtime, allowing many-to-many connectivity across all connected devices. Then, each new connector driver introduced inherits compatibility with all others loaded for many-to-many bi-directional read/write across all endpoints.

Flexxbotics Transformers are employed for a wide range of controller interfacing and orchestration scenarios across tool controller-based systems, PLC-based automation, robotic workcells, inspection and test stations, automated assembly, and others.

“Open interoperability is essential for the next generation of autonomous manufacturing,” said Bouchard. “By releasing Flexxbotics Transformers as open source, we’re enabling companies to build, extend, and scale industrial automation without artificial restrictions.”