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Just what is distributed motion?

With the proliferation of networking technology, many automation vendors are devising ways to deploy it to distribute motion control architecture throughout machinery. A set of three schemes for doing this exploits intelligence in drives to offload some of the computing burden from the equipment’s controller.

The first of these schemes closes servo position, velocity and torque loops in the drives themselves, while the controller still executes motion commands, manages I/O and generates the trajectory profile for the networked drives. “In earlier architectures with analog interface drives, typically all the servo loops, with the exception of the torque loop, were closed in  a dedicated motion controller,” notes Bob Hirschinger, principle application engineer for Rockwell Automation.

Another scheme pushes the trajectory path planning down into the drive. “Instead of sending trajectory planner profile information to the drive over the network every millisecond or so, we just send the motion move command data to the drive, and the drive executes the trajectory path planning,” says Hirschinger.

In yet another scheme, the drive executes the high-level motion command logic directly. “Distributed programs execute locally in the drives, and the machine or line controller synchronizes the drives through a network connection,” says Hirschinger.

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