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Gantries are mechanical devices that move orthogonally in three dimensions. They form the basis of a wide variety of systems that process liquids, biological samples, industrial materials, and print, cut, or otherwise operate on materials. Gantry Control involves the synchronized control of motion functions such as point-to-point transfers, path following, pipette/cuvette management, and pick and place operation.
Pan & tilt pointing means motion control of a mechanical system that can ‘pan’ (rotate around a vertical axis) and tilt (rotate around a horizontal axis). There are a large variety of machines that use a pan & tilt pointing mechanism including security cameras, laser pointing systems, fire control systems, film production equipment, radar control systems, and more.
CAM profiling is a general purpose motion technique utilizing a pre-stored look-up table of desired positions driven by an incoming command encoder datastream. CAMs are especially useful for encoding profiles which don’t follow a standard envelop such as a trapezoidal or parabolic profile. While originally used just to replicate mechanical rotating CAMs, electronic CAM profiling has grown to provide an array of profile generation and position compensation functions.
Microscope control means motion control of automated microscopes, also called automated digital microscopes or more broadly automated microscopy. Such systems generally contain three dimensions of very precisely controlled motion; an XY table that moves the sample and a Z axis which focuses the lens/sensor element. Automated microscopes are a vital part of a broad array of equipment such as blood analyzers, biological and chemical automated assay machines, semiconductor capital equipment, photonics, and much more.
Indexers, sometimes also called front end loaders, are general purpose devices that operate in the vertical dimension and form the basis of storage and retrieval systems as well devices such as Semiconductor SMIF-pod access systems. The focus of this motion application will be control of the vertical axis motion, but many storage and retrieval systems couple the vertical axis with a robotic arm or actuator to deliver the carried object to its final storage location.