Motion Control Has a Field Day

Chuck Lewin, President & CEO of Performance Motion Devices (download as PDF)

As technology progresses, the cost and performance of components goes down, and system-level products that utilize those components gain the benefit. Such is certainly the case for motion control products, where, thanks to dramatic reductions in computing cost, once-exotic features such as point-to-point S-curve profiling have become commonplace, even on lower-end systems.

But optimizations on older architectures can only go so far, no matter how much the cost of components goes down. This is because ancillary costs, such as for cabling, can outweigh the system cost. When this happens, elements need to be re-organized, so that the entire system cost can continue to drop with reduced component cost.

This is exactly what has happened in the field of motion control. Centralized rack and card-based systems are starting to give way to more distributed systems. And systems that once used cables to connect multiple modules are now being assembled on a single card.

This article will examine some of these trends, and detail the four major motion control architectures in use today, two of which can be traced back to earlier motion control approaches, and two of which are more recent additions. In all cases the cost of these systems have come down, but the newer architectures rearrange system cost in a way that may make them welladapted for a growing number of applications.