Design and Implementation of a Delay-Guaranteed Motor Drive for Precision Motion Control

This paper proposes a systematic design approach for a precision-guaranteed motion control system. We develop a delay-guaranteed motor drive with our new software implementation and real-time Ethernet, which can be used as a building block to build up a multi-axis motion control system. Our drive software implementation provides a probabilistic guarantee on drive-local processing delays to motor actuation, while real-time Ethernet provides a deterministic guarantee on message communication delays from a motion control host to each drive. In the paper, we address the precision of a motion control system in two terms: host cycle time and simultaneous actuation deviation. The host cycle time is a period with which the host can periodically release motor control messages while the average drive utilization does not exceed 1, and the simultaneous actuation deviation is the difference between the earliest and the latest actuation at different drives in response to the same message. In our approach, the main objective is to minimize the periods of tasks in each drive, using our stochastic analysis, which gives us a minimum possible host cycle time. Together with an existing delay analysis of real-time Ethernet, we analyze the end-to-end delay from message release to motor actuation and in turn the simultaneous actuation deviation. Through experiments, we show that for various requirements on the deadline miss probabilities of the tasks, we can successfully reduce the host cycle time and evaluate the resulting distribution of the simultaneous actuation deviation depending on the number of drives.