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.

Advanced Motion Control, Medical Device Equipment, Automation and Robotics, Life Sciences

Haptic Feedback in Motion Control

Motion control applications with an operator remotely controlling a robot hand or mechanism can now be expanded to where the operator can “feel” what the robot is touching. This article talks about two common ways to implement robotic hand haptic feedback.

Motion Control Techniques, Digital Current Loop, Field Oriented Control (FOC), Step Motors, Best Practices

Common Motion Problems and How to Fix Them - Part I

Everyone who has worked in motion control has a war story, be it the machine that mysteriously stopped working or the motor that wouldn't stop vibrating. Fortunately, common problems often have common solutions.

Motion Control Techniques, Servo Motors and Drives, Motor Setup

Regenerative Braking, Part II

The second part of our regenerative braking and battery regeneration deep-dive uses a theoretical model to prove the existence of steady state regeneration and provides insight into estimating the energy recovered during regenerative conditions of an electric vehicle.

Motion Control Techniques, Servo Motors and Drives, Motor Setup

Regenerative Braking - Part I: Steady State Analysis

In this two-part piece, we investigate the conditions at which battery regeneration can occur. The emphasis of this article is on regenerative braking and the analysis of a battery powered vehicle operating at a steady state.

Motion Control Techniques, Integrated Circuits (ICs), Magellan, Motion Control Boards, Prodigy, Machine Controller, Motion Controllers, Juno Family of ICs

Top 10 Tips - Things to Know About Motion Controllers

Motion controllers are complex animals, no doubt about it. But with a few tips from the experts about proper specification, location, and avoidance of mishaps, choosing the right controller for the job is as easy as one, two, three.

Servo Motors and Drives, Servo Motors

Tuning Servo Motors

Get an overview of proportional, integral, derivative (PID) based servo loops. We’ll introduce two standard manual tuning methods that work well for a large variety of systems.

Step Motors, Servo Motors and Drives

Advanced Step Motor Control

Motion Control Techniques, Step Motors, Integrated Circuits (ICs), Magellan, Digital Amplifers, Atlas, Best Practices, Juno Family of ICs

Motoring to Success

Before selecting the best motor, or motors, for your design project, take time to understand what kind of positioning controls and functionality you need. In this article, Motoring to Success, we will look at the issues concerning the selection of the right type of motor controller for positioning control applications. The focus will be on understanding how these motors are controlled, and how the choice of the control techniques affects the system cost.

Motion Control Techniques, Magellan

Motion Performance Trace

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?

Motion Control Techniques, Motion Profiles

Techniques to Precisely Synchronize Motion Axes - A Deep Dive

Many motion applications require precise synchronization of one or more axes. Understand some of the important approaches toward motion synchronization and have some fun with a motion synchronization video from the PMD lab.

Phase Initialization Step By Step Guide

This document describes in detail the setup procedure for initializing commutation on the brushless Navigator and Pilot families of motion processors.

WPI’s CARP Robotic System

Can a machine create art? The goal of this project was to bridge the gap between robotic and human capabilities through the development of an autonomous painting robot. Using PMD's machine controller board, this innovative team of students created a robot that mimic'd the motions undertaken by painters.