Papers and Articles

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.

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.

Step motors are a common solution for controlling the position of moving components, but in some cases can be inadequate since the motor position is not necessarily known. Even though step motors are inexpensive when compared to brushless motors, in many critical applications, care has to be taken to ensure that when a command is given to the step motor controller, the motor actually ends up where the user wants it to go. In this article, we will look at each motor control design option and provide an in-depth review of a new closed loop motion control system.

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