Know your options, choose your solution

Download our white papers and technical articles to learn about motion control solutions, components and motor control architectures. Explore your options and develop the best strategy for balancing lab automation and robotics costs, reliability, maintenance, and time-to-market.

Field Oriented Control (FOC), Step Motors, Servo Motors and Drives, Juno Family of ICs

Field Oriented Control (FOC) - A Deep Dive

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.

Motion Control Techniques, Medical Device Equipment, Life Sciences, Automated Packaging

Mechanical Resonant Frequency and How to Analyze It

Explore why a machine is exhibiting mechanical resonant frequency and what tools can be used to analyze it.

Step Motors, Prodigy Motion Boards, Magellan, ION, Juno Family of ICs, Pro-Motion

Too Hot, Too Heavy, and Too Power Hungry

Liquid Handling, Prodigy Motion Boards, Life Sciences, Magellan, Atlas, Digital Drives, Juno Family of ICs

Precision Fluid Handling: Optimizing Lab Automation Mechanics

Step Motors, Prodigy Motion Boards, Magellan, ION, Juno Family of ICs, Pro-Motion

Step Motor Noise

Step Motors, Prodigy Motion Boards, Magellan, ION, Servo Motors, Juno Family of ICs, Pro-Motion

Servo Motor Noise

Motion Control Techniques, Step Motors, Motion Profiles

Mathematics of Motion Control Profiles

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.

Medical Device Equipment, Liquid Handling, Syringe Dispensing, Life Sciences

Motion Techniques For Improved Liquid Handling

Liquid Handling Robot systems oftentimes use peristaltic pumps to deliver reagents and other fluids to test sites. Although some smaller volumes of liquid can easily be delivered by plunger-style syringe pumps, larger liquid volumes often use peristaltic pumps because they have much higher displacement volumes and the mechanical system of rollers and motors are not exposed to the liquid itself. This paper will demonstrate the statistical differences in delivered volume with and without an adaptive control system and the resulting higher accuracy that can be achieved.

Motion Control Techniques, Motor Setup, Motion Profiles

S-Curve Motion Profiles - Vital For Optimizing Machine 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.

Advanced Motion Control, Medical Device Equipment, Life Sciences, Motion Control Trends

Motion Control Technology Trends for Medical and Laboratory Applications

Step Motors, Encoders, Best Practices, Webinars

How to select an encoder

Medical Device Equipment, Liquid Handling, Closed Loop Motion Control, Syringe Dispensing, Life Sciences

Featured Resource

Optimize A Control Architecture for High Accuracy Syringe Dispensing

Automated Liquid Handling systems are the preferred method when accurate dispensing of liquids is required. Two common architectures for dispensing are contact and jet dispensing. This paper will demonstrate motion control dispensing applications where the required motion accuracy can only be achieved with a closed loop control architecture (position feedback).

Advanced Motion Control, Motion Control Techniques, Packaging, Automated Packaging

Techniques That Improve Automated Packaging Equipment Performance

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.

Medical Device Equipment, Liquid Handling, Life Sciences, Precision Motion Control

Improve Liquid Handling Robot Throughput with Direct Path Planning

In Liquid Handling Robots that are properly balanced, the gantry robot utilization reaches close to 100%, meaning the robot is almost always moving. This article (and poster) shows how we have implemented a high-speed motion system on a Liquid Handling Robot gantry that is aware of system clearances so that it can start a planar (X/Y) move while a Z-axis move is still ongoing. By employing such a motion control solution, robot move times can be improved by 25% over conventional robot moves and over 50% compared to systems that only employ single axis moves.

Motion Control Techniques, Motor Setup, Motion Profiles, Motion Control Boards, Prodigy, Digital Amplifers, Atlas

Motion Controller Design Architectures - A Deep Dive

A detailed look at design choices for building a machine controller that provides precision motion control. This article addresses whether it is best to build or buy motion control hardware and software, and what aspects of your application are most important for determining the architecture of your machine controller.