Papers and Articles

The question facing the designer is: how do you go about making these improvements? How do you optimize the various motion controller variables such as profile parameters, servo gains, and commutation, to arrive at the best overall machine performance?

Many motion applications require high accuracy both during, and at the end of, the move, but even if you are using perfectly optimized PID values to control position, the compensation loop is never perfect. You can improve motor performance by adding motion control elements outside of the PID loop. In this article, we will look at torque control and the related subject of torque FeedFoward, which will make your equipment run smoother, and deliver better accuracy.

Is servo motor tuning rocket science or a walk in the park? You decide! This article offers an overview of proportional, integral, derivative (PID) based servo tuning, and two standard manual tuning methods that work well for a large variety of machine designs. It shows that optimal parameters vary with application and performance goals, even for the exact same motor and amplifier setup.

Brushless DC, step, and DC brush motors are the three most commonly used motor types for positioning and velocity motion control applications. Of these, brushless DC and step motors are “multi-phase,” meaning they require some type of external coil excitation. Explore the most popular techniques for multi-phase motor control, including Field-oriented Control (FOC), and determine which techniques work best for various positioning and high-speed spinning applications.

This article will review the mathematics of motion profiles and help you understand which profiles work best for which applications. You'll gain valuable insights into how to tune your motion control profile for maximum performance.

S-curve motion profiles add “smoothing” segments to the traditional 3-phase trapezoidal profile (accelerate, coast, decelerate). Why is this better? The answer is beyond the motor, at the load itself.

TENSIONING – GEARING - CAMMING - In this article we will review three widely used motion control techniques: web tension control, proportional material spacing, and CAM-based synchronized profiling.

We continue with our deep dive series that gives you tools to diagnose common motion control problems and get your machine back on track!