Motors, R&D and Politics

The “Green Revolution” is under way. Regardless of how you rationalize it, there is a lot of activity around reducing the amount of energy being consumed in almost every aspect of American life. For the most part, its well intentioned. As good stewards of the resources we have, we should use them responsibly.

Energy conservation has been an active part of the mechatronics world for some time. The variable frequency drive, now a $1B+/year product is marketed and sold because of its ability to reduce electrical consumption in about 1/3 of all applications. So we who are part of the drives and controls community have been in the vanguard of energy conservation for many years. An often overlooked fact. We’ve been “Green” for decades. Read more

Time and Technology March On

Motion Control used to be its own unique domain in the control world. People tended to leave you alone. Few understood it. And because there were so many problems, many avoided it. Don’t get hooked up with to it.

So control most of the major technologies grew up on their own. CNC’s first developed in the 1950’s were definitely their own thing. Very complex math engines that were used to manage metal cutting operations to make complex strucutres. Modern aircraft would be pretty much impossible without the incredible precision available through CNC’s.

Process Computers were full mainframe computers with totally unique hardware for operating chemical refineries. Wire trays with miles and miles of wire running through process plants with ever increasing demands for information. Read more

My first brush with Mechatronics came courtesy of White Sands Missile Range

Imagine a missile launch,” my boss explained. “It comes out of the silo without warning, goes like a streak, and sometimes explodes on launch. We want an unmanned tracking mount that will sit close to the launch area, pick up the missile, and track it — no matter what.”

The engineering assignment was pure Mechatronics. Make the mechanical pieces strong but light enough for the accelerations and slew rates to come. Give the drives enough power, speed, and responsiveness. Make sure the sensors could pick up the bird, lock on it and follow it to the death. Fashion controls that would tie it all together and make it all work.

It was, in short, classic Mechatronics, though we never used that word. It would be two years later, in 1969, before Tetsuro Mori, a senior engineer at Yaskawa, coined it. But how the practice of Mechatronics, and the engineering disciplines it uses, have grown in the years since then. Read more

Better Software Tools

Better Software Tools Help Machine Builders Reap the Benefits of Mechatronics.

Newer software programs intended for machine builders take advantage of mechatronic principles and easily blend the necessary and different engineering disciplines.

By John Pritchard, Global Product Marketing Manager
Kinetix Motion Control, Rockwell Automation

Traditionally, machines have been designed and built using individual mechanical, control, and electrical design teams — that work independently to produce separate pieces of the whole system. Often, the mechanical team will turn the design over to the controls team and hope they can integrate the software and controls before control and programming issues are addressed. The machine might deliver substantial performance and flexibility advantages, but typically the marriage of the mechanical functions with the control system is not optimal; it is merely sufficient. Read more

The Evolution of Motion Programming Devices

Here’s a closer look at software development for programming motion systems and how these choices affect software reusability.

By Chuck Lewin Performance Motion Devices

Software development can be the single greatest engineering cost for many machine design projects. This observation is especially true for motion control projects because of the inherent complexity of managing such real time tasks as profile generation, events, and throughput.

Do you protocol?

It’s easy to be a bit overwhelmed with the range of choices in motion control protocols, languages, interface standards, and control architectures. However, as it turns out, a few basic concepts provide the necessary foundation for understanding motion programming languages. Read more

Multi-Axis Systems Turn Custom into Standard

Rexroth’s camoLINE is a Cartesian Motion building system that allows rapid combination of pneumatic and electromechanical components.

Special machine construction and standardization: — this used to be a contradiction. Here is how one manufacturer developed a modular system to assemble handling systems with standard and custom components.

Schiller automation systems are used in the production of semiconductors in all clean room classes, in microelectronics processes, and in the production of solar cells and Smart Cards. Schiller recently chose camoLINE from Rexroth for its custom equipment. The camoLINE modular system covers commonly used handling tasks with flexible components from linear motion and assembly systems, pneumatics, drives, and controls.

The camoLINE systems offer features required for individual handling systems, such as electric and pneumatic axes, connecting elements and profile struts, ball-screw assemblies, and toothed-belt drives for high travel speeds. Depending on customer requirements, either servo or stepping motors can be used with an integrated belt drive or a planetary gear.

Read more

Modeling Mechatronic Systems

Able to significantly reduce design risks, simulating overall system performance does not require expert knowledge of modeling.

By Richard Comerford, Electronic Products

The lesson of ancient Babel still resonates through the halls of design firms today: if you really want to screw up a project, make sure that everyone working on it speaks a different language. Having a common technical language to express design concepts and plans is essential to enabling a team of engineers to work together.

And before everyone goes off to work out the details of their particular part of the design, it doesn’t hurt to do an overall simulation of the design concept. This will help ensure that, when completed, a complex system can do the job for which it was intended. Read more

Mechatronics’ Present and Future

Having just gotten back from the annual extravaganza known as the Consumer Electronics Show, I’m happy to report that the outlook for mechatronics is definitely positive. The integration of electronics and mechanical systems was clearly in evidence at CES, on both the micro and macro level.

To start small, one of the more impressive in-suite demos was presented by Microvision of Redmond, WA. The company has developed what it calls the PicoP engine for projecting video and images onto any reflective surface. The engine consists of a MEMS chip with a mirror that can steer RGB laser light to raster the image onto the surface. An entire system was contained in a case about the size of an iPod. There were also a lot of new game controllers that rely upon the ability to sense motion to provide an extra dimension to gaming, as well as hepatic feed back systems to let you feel the pain.

At the other end of the size spectrum, there were the huge MEMS micromirror projection systems in the Texas Instruments booth. There were also several concept cars from Ford demonstrating the use of electronic systems for control of steering, abs, air-bags, and other critical systems that were once strictly mechanical. This list could continue to grow, but it’s clear that the marriage of electronics and mechanics is still on very solid footing.

I also saw a number of display systems, and while they didn’t rely on mechanics in the larger sense, it was their physical performance that started me thinking about the future of mechatronics. What I was hearing is that this one type of display system, while its appearance was excellent, was having problems related to material stability over time. It was critical to the products success, yet it was something that was only found out once many, many units were in production.

Today we are at a stage where we can simulate the interaction of mechanical and electronic systems with a good degree of accuracy. But when it comes to the performance of materials over time, or in a particular design for that matter, we seem to still be in the dark ages. The materials/chemical engineer can use his or her expertise to suggest what is likely to happen, and has tools for creating new molecular compounds, but I know of no system today that will allow you to integrate that knowledge into the realm of electromechanical design.

Once we’ve tackled the problems that mechatronics poses to unifying electromechanical design, I hope we’ll be able to take the next step into materials science and bring in the ability to alter or design new materials that will fulfill the end requirements of product in new and unique ways. But I guess we have to learn to walk before we can run (and after having been all over the huge Las Vegas Convention Center for CES, I’m happy for now to still be able to walk).