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End-users seek motion standards

Part two of our report covering a ground-breaking meeting last October where engineers from Anheuser-Busch, General Mills, Hershey Foods, Nabisco and Procter & Gamble spoke out about their packaging controls needs.

The meeting was the first step in the likely formation of a working group for packaging under the umbrella of the OMAC Users Group. (Part one of this report was published last month and is available on-line at [ib]packworld.com/go/omac[n].)

At the meeting, head engineers from Anheuser-Busch, General Mills, Hershey Foods, Nabisco and Procter & Gamble assembled into a panel that made a case for motion control standardization. When asked which aspect of motion control would end-users like standardized the most, the panelists equally preferred a standard motion programming language and a standard motion networking protocol.

Since there is no dominant networking protocol for motion control, suppliers peppered the panel with questions as to which of the existing protocols seemed best as a candidate for a standard. Though all of the panelists have standardized on Ethernet for controller-to-controller communications, none of the panelists currently has a motion control networking standard, except for Hershey, which tends to specify SERCOS.

Regarding SERCOS, Richard Siegel, director, OEM business development for Motion Engineering, Inc., a PC-based motion control supplier, asked: "SERCOS has long suffered from a chicken-and-egg [situation]; it's a great technology, but [there's] not enough pieces for enough vendors to use them effectively. What does it need to be really widely adopted?"

The answer from Hershey Foods, the largest user of SERCOS on the panel, was interesting. "From my perspective, that's a marketing question and not a technical question," responded Keith Campbell, director of automation & integration for Hershey. "It does what we need, and we don't have any enhancements in mind. It's up to all of you [the supplier community] to respond from a marketing perspective."

Nabisco also spoke up: "We would not position ourselves to go to an automation vendor and say we want SERCOS," said Nabisco's Don Boyle, senior director, process control systems. "We would listen to their presentation. We would ask why haven't all the motion vendors adopted it as a primary communications protocol."

Procter & Gamble has also left the choice of the motion protocol up to its automation vendor. "We have a key [automation] vendor that we have partnered with, and that vendor hasn't used SERCOS," said Daniel Amundson, technology leader, global product supply engineering at P&G. "The critical mass hasn't been there to push us over the top. But I see that happening."

The panel was then asked if Fast Ethernet (100 megabits/sec) had been considered as an alternative to SERCOS.

"No, but FireWire has sparked my interest," responded P&G's Rob Aleksa, corporate controls section head. FireWire, an extremely fast network protocol, was originally created by Apple Computer. It is now an open standard under IEEE-1394. So far, only a few motion vendors support it.

At that point, Motion Engineering's Siegel spoke up again, claiming that it's possible to separate the physical layer from the actual protocol, making it possible to run the SERCOS protocol on top of a low-cost, high-speed PC network such as Ethernet or FireWire. "That may be where the two converge," he said.

IEC 1131 as a standard?

The panelists were then asked if their respective companies would consider either adding a motion-specific programming language specification to the existing IEC 1131-3 PLC programming standard, or creating a separate specification for an IEC programming language. (IEC 1131-3 is a non-hardware-specific, international standard for programming industrial controllers, whether a PC or PLC. The specification is made up of four programming languages that can be mixed and matched to program an industrial controller. But it lacks a motion control language and has not yet been widely embraced in the U.S.)

Hershey's Campbell was open to using IEC 1131 as a vehicle, but registered this objection: "Possibly putting it under IEC 1131 implies the PLC is still king in this environment. We're not convinced PLCs need to be involved in packaging machinery," he said, alluding to the idea that a motion controller could be programmed to handle logic as well, dispensing with the need for a separate PLC.

The idea of building on an existing standard was appealing to Anheuser-Busch. "I'm a proponent of not inventing another language if there's something in IEC 1131 that will work," said Ray Zimmerman, director, corporate engineering. "We have enough difficulty in training our workforce without adding additional [languages]."

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