• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.26-32
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• 2022

EtherCAT is an Ethernet-based fieldbus system standardized in IEC 61158 and SEMI, and widely used in the fields of factory automation, semiconductor equipment and robotics. In this paper, an EtherCAT master is implemented on an embedded board with Arm based 64-bit quad-core processor and its jitter performance is evaluated at the output of the network interface to include all the effects of the entire system in the results. For the EtherCAT master system, an open source EtherCAT master stack, Simple Open EtherCAT Master (SOEM), is installed on PREEMPT_RT patched Linux operating system for real-time operation. The results show that the jitter performance is comparable to that of Xenomai-based master and the EtherCAT master with two master instances has similar jitter performance to the EtherCAT master with one master instance.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.131-136
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• 2021

EtherCAT is an Ethernet-based fieldbus system standardized in IEC 61158 and SEMI, and widely used in the fields of factory automation, semiconductor equipment and robotics. In this paper, a real-time EtherCAT master is implemented on Linux operating systems and its performances are evaluated. To enhance the real-time capability of mainline Linux kernel, Xenomai is applied as a real-time framework and an open source EtherCAT master stack, Simple Open EtherCAT Master (SOEM), is installed on it. Unlike other studies, the real-time performance of the EtherCAT master is evaluated at the output of the network interface card, so that the evaluation results include all possible effects from the EtherCAT master system. The implemented EtherCAT master can send and receive packets up to 20KHz control frequency with low jitter, even in stressed condition.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.11-16
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• 2023

EtherCAT is an Ethernet-based fieldbus system standardized in IEC 61158 and SEMI, and widely used in the fields of factory automation, semiconductor equipment and robotics. In this paper, without operating system, we have implemented an EtherCAT master with an open source EtherCAT master stack SOEM on STM32 Nucleo-144 board with an STM32F767 microcontroller. And its jitter performance has been evaluated at the output of the network port to include all the effects of the entire system in the results. The results show that the implemented EtherCAT master has precise control performance for control frequencies from 1KHz to 8KHz and relatively superior jitter performance compared to the EtherCAT masters with real-time patched Linux operating system.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2013.05a
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• pp.71-72
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• 2013

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.244-248
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• 2009

This paper describes a real-time EtherCAT Master library. The library is developed using Xenomai. Xenomai is a real-time development framework. It cooperates with the Linux kernel, in order to provide a pervasive, interface-agnostic, hard real-time support to user-space applications, seamlessly integrated into the GNU/Linux environment. The proposed master library implements EtherCAT protocol for master side, and supports Application Programming Interfaces(APIs) for programming of real-time application which controls EtherCAT slave.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.43-49
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• 2019

Recently, the importance of industrial fieldbus has been highlighted since the emergence of Industry 4.0. In particular, the Ethernet-based fieldbus protocol is actively used in automation systems. This paper proposes a safety fence system based on EtherCAT, a type of Ethernet-based fieldbus, to measure external loads. In order to measure the external loads, a force sensor was connected to an EtherCAT slave that transmits the sensor data to an EtherCAT master in real-time. The master ultimately controls the angle of the safety fence when it detects danger based on the given data. In the future, more effiecient safety fence system will be developed by using a HMI system to communicate with the EtherCAT master to manage safety and by employing multiple sensors to increase the accuracy of the fence system.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.8 no.6
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• pp.295-301
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• 2013

In this paper, we propose a real-time centralized soft motion control system for high speed and precision robot control. The system engages EtherCAT as high speed industrial motion network to enable force based motion control in real-time and is composed of software-based master controller with PC and slave interface modules. Hard real-time control capacity is essential for high speed and precision robot control. To implement soft based real time control, The soft based master controller is designed using a real time kernel (RTX) and EtherCAT network, and servo processes are located in the master controller for centralized motion control. In the proposed system, slave interface modules just collect and transfer all sensor information of robot to the master controller via the EtherCAT network. It is proven by experimental results that the proposed soft motion control system has real time controllability enough to apply for various robot control systems.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.281-284
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• 2023

Real-time control communication network system is important for developing defense robots because it affects environmental interaction, performance, and safety. We propose a real-time control communication network using the Xenomai real-time operating system and the open-source EtherCAT master library, SOEM. EtherCAT is an Ethernet-based industrial communication method. It has low latency and many functions such as cable redundancy and distributed clock synchronization. We use Xenomai RTOS and Intel NUC to develop the system. Experimental tests demonstrate the Real-time EtherCAT master implementation, and communication with CiA301-based slave devices. The jitter measurement was conducted to validate the real-time performance of the system. The proposed system shows possibility for real-time robotics applications in various defense robots.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.94-98
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• 2009

This paper proposes an architecture of a real-time EtherCAT master library called RtEML. The controls EtherCAT slaves under EtherCAT protocol in real-time. It provides a simple programming interface which is useful in developing robot application in C/C++ or C#. To achieve deterministic, hard real-time control in Microsoft Windows environment without additional hardware, INtime is used. Since INtime is designed specifically to take advantage of the powerful capabilities of the x86 processor architecture, the proposed RtEML achieves microseconds of real-time performance.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.38 no.7
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• pp.785-797
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• 2014

Support for the precise time synchronization of EtherCAT, known as distributed clock (DC), enables the design of highly synchronized operations in distributed real-time systems. This study evaluates the performance of the EtherCAT DC through extensive experiments in a real automation system. We constructed an EtherCAT control system using Xenomai and IgH EtherCAT stack, and analyzed the clock deviation for different devices in the network. The results of the evaluation revealed that the accuracy of the synchronized clock is affected by several factors such as the number of slave devices, period of drift compensation, and type of system time base. In particular, we found that careful decision regarding the system time base is required because it has a fundamental effect on the master operation, which results in significantly different performance characteristics.