If you are asking if there is a move away from hard-wiring between robots and PLC and hard-wired safety relays towards networked communication in general, with distributed I/O, including safety device communication, then yes - but not specifically Profibus. You don't build a multi-robot line with hard-wired safety circuits and hard-wiring of all field devices back to a single control cabinet and PLC any more, it just isn't done that way. Far, far easier to use distributed I/O with networked communication (of some sort) between them.
I'm seeing mostly devicenet and ethernet. Had a couple applications that just used ethernet alone, which ran into network traffic issues causing lack of real-time response ... not good, when the safety system is involved. The usual approach that I've been seeing, seems to use both devicenet and ethernet. The time-critical real-time-response signals, including safety PLC communication, is on devicenet, anything else is on ethernet.
As for Profibus specifically, I don't remember the last time I've seen it ...
