One Size Never Fits All

Sometimes a lot is made of new technology. There is a tendency to talk about the next big thing in whatever field as “The Solution”. But there’s rarely just one solution that works for everyone.

Currently in the “car wars” (a favorite topic, since we are all effected by gasoline prices) many ideas have been advanced as “The Solution”. We heard a lot about bio-fuels reducing our dependency on oil by 30%, but now are primarily contributing to rising food prices. Hydrogen fuel cells will replace gasoline engines, but not anytime soon because we don’t have an infrastructure that can produce hydrogen as a fuel, nor an acceptable means to store it. And so it goes. This progression of ideas, and attempts to market same, makes the point that there is rarely a single solution that suits everyone. Read more

More Mechatronic and Robotic Reflections

The blend of sensors and motion control become crucial in many applications. The dextrous robot hand of recent years cracks eggs like a chef with the aid of sophisticated pressure sensors at the tips of its “fingers”. Check out the Shadow Robot company for some amazing videos of their “air muscle” powered robot hand in action. Lots of interesting work has been done to mimic the human hand. A miracle of grace and efficiency that is hard to duplicate. Read more

Robots are Mechatronics

Robots are a fun topic. They tease our imagination to wander into the realm of possibilities. Especially when we create film robots with personalities like R2D2, I Robot and the many strange variations of Artificial Intelligence.

And we begin to push the envelope again as to what mechatronics properly consists of. Consider the “loader” in Aliens when Sigourney Weaver starts fighting with the Queen alien. This hydraulic system, once called a “man amplifier” was designed to facilitate moving high loads easily with human dexterity and control. Read more

Mechatronics in the OR

Using the da Vinci Surgical System shown here, the surgeon operates while seated at a console viewing a 3D image of the surgical field. His or her fingers grasp the console’s master controls below the display, and the system translates the surgeon’s hand, wrist, and finger movements into precise, real-time movements of surgical instruments by the robot.

A system-level approach moves robotic surgery from science fiction to reality.

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5 Design Challenges and Solutions for Machine Builders

Machine builders can virtually prototype their machine control systems with LabVIEW and the NI SoftMotion Development Module for motion profile generation as well as mechanically simulate and detect collisions with SolidWorks and COSMOSMotion.

Intense competition is putting pressure on machine builders to deliver machines with higher throughput, reduced operating cost, and increased safety.

By Nipun Mathur, National Instruments

Faster, better, cheaper, safer is the name of the game for machine builders. For this reason, today’s machine builders have switched from rigid, single-purpose machines – relying purely on mechanical gears and cams – to flexible multipurpose machines by adopting modern control systems and servomotors.

Although these improvements have made machines more adaptable, they also have introduced a significant amount of complexity to the machines and subsequently to the machine design process. Along with designing the mechanicals, machine builders now incorporate control logic, human machine interfaces (HMIs), networking, and machine condition monitoring systems into their designs. The added complexity has created inefficiencies in the machine design process that lengthen design time and increase design cost.
Solving this multidisciplinary engineering problem requires improvements in three key areas – development techniques, design tools, and embedded control technology. The term mechatronics is gaining popularity as a way to describe this evolution. It represents an industry-wide effort to improve the design process by integrating the best available development practices and technologies to streamline machine design, prototyping, and deployment. A mechatronics-based approach can lower the risks associated with machine design and meet the following five key challenges that machine designers face today. Read more

Properly Manage Heat and Time for Better Duty Cycle

Duty Cycle and Peak Current both influence the operating life of brushless servo motors.

In mechatronic designs, it is critical to manage motor heat dissipation as excess heat can affect the accuracy of a system’s mechanical components. A thorough understanding of motor thermal characteristics can ensure your brushless servomotors enhance overall system operation.

By Richard Welch Jr., Consulting Engineer – Exlar Corporation

The thermal characteristics of a brushless servo motor determine the length of time that the motor can operate in a peak range; a measurement many engineers and managers use to determine a motor’s productivity rating. This peak current range is defined as any current level between the motor’s continuous rating and its peak rating. The continuous ratings are often defined as the highest current a motor can draw while continuously dissipating the resulting motor heat in a 25°C ambient temperature.

There have long been “rules of thumb” in the brushless servo motor industry about what is acceptable to use as a duty cycle when operating in the peak or intermittent ranges. There have also been “rules of thumb” applied to how long any given motor can operate at peak current on an instantaneous basis.

Many times you will hear reference to numbers like one second or half a second as acceptable times to operate in the peak range, and it is believed that if you are in peak for one second, and then off for one second, you’ll have an acceptable duty cycle, in this case, 50%. Read more

Ensure Gear Reducers Contribute to System Efficiency

More than $30 billion is spent on electricity dedicated to electric driven systems, of which, nearly 70% goes to motor systems. There are ways to reduce this cost in your motion based mechatronics system.
By Alex Howe, Application Engineer
US WITTENSTEIN Group

Motor-driven equipment in manufacturing currently accounts for more than 2.3 quads, or 2.3 quadrillion BTUs (roughly 674 billion kilowatt hours) of energy use, which equals nearly 23% of all electricity sold in the United States. Read more