The Design and Implementation of a Network-based Stand-alone Motion System

A motion controller has been used variously in industry such as semiconductor manufacture equipment, industrial robot, assembly/conveyor line applications and CNC equipment. There are several types of controller in motion control. One of these is a PC-based motion controller such as PCI or ISA, and another is stand-alone motion controller. The PC bus-based motion controller is popular because of improving bus architectures and GUI (Graphic User Interface) that offer convenience of use to user. There are some problems in this. The PC bus-based solution allows for only one of the form factors, so it has a poor flexibility. The overall system package size is bigger than other motion control system. And also, additional axes of control require additional slot, however the number of slots is limited. Furthermore, unwieldy and many wirings come to connect plants or I/O. The stand-alone motion controller has also this limit of axes of control and wiring problems. To resolve these problems, controller must have capability of operating as stand-alone devices that resides outside the computer and it needs network capability to communicate to each motion device. In this paper, a network-based stand-alone motion system is proposed. This system integrates PC and motion controller into one stand-alone motion system, and uses CAN (Controller Area Network) as network protocol. Single board computer that is type of 3.5" FDD form factor is used to reduce the system size and cost. It works with Windows XP Embedded as operating system. This motion system operates by itself or serves as master motion controller that communicates to slave motion controller. The Slave motion controllers can easily connect to master motion system through CAN-network.