EmailWare: a tool for e‐manufacturing

Presents a monitoring and inspecting tool for manufacturing set‐ups. A general software architecture for this type of application, which is distributed, object‐oriented and based on a client‐server model, is briefly outlined and then applied to an industrial robot. The resulting application, called EmailWare, is then introduced and demonstrated using industrial robot manipulators from ABB Robotics. The application is capable of sending e‐mail and SMS messages to selected users when the programmed events occur, and receiving and processing commands from those users. Experience with this application clearly shows its usefulness for the purpose debugging purposes by system developers, but also for monitoring routine tasks by system operators.