Design and transmission of data structures for industrial robots in digitized industrial systems

Abstract

The increasing integration of industrial robots into digitized manufacturing systems requires unified, lightweight, and vendor-independent data models. Existing frameworks such as the OPC UA Companion Specification for Robotics offer rich semantics and interoperability but are computationally intensive, while MQTTbased approaches provide simplicity and speed at the cost of structure and meaning. This paper proposes the Sparkplug Robotics Profile v1, a lightweight extension to the Sparkplug B standard that bridges this gap by introducing robot-specific semantics and state management within an event-driven MQTT architecture. The proposed model defines structured telemetry (RobotData), command (RobotCmd), and lifecycle (RobotBirth) message types using Google Protocol Buffers for efficient transmission and consistent interpretation across platforms. This approach enables real-time data exchange, scalable multirobot coordination, and native compatibility with XRbased digital-twin environments. The results highlight that Sparkplug Robotics Profile v1 preserves the simplicity of MQTT while providing semantic depth comparable to OPC UA, facilitating interoperable and resource-efficient robot connectivity from edge to cloud.