Big Capabilities for Smaller Controllers

At first that was a bit of an emotional adaptation, Pritchard recalled, as engineers worried that it wouldn't be as convenient to access the panel. "But then they worked out the amount of time they actually have to be in there and realized it made sense to get the control panel up and out of the way." It also makes it easier to create a machine environment suitable for food safety and washdown situations.

Conserving Panel Space

To help create smaller panels, machine builders are also looking to move more functions out of the panel and onto the machine. The Allen-Bradley IP67 Slim ArmorBlock I/O is an example of this capability. Aagard's machine shows two on-machine ArmorBlock I/O units connected through EtherNet/IP.

"Taking the I/O out of the panel and putting it on the machine is not particularly new, but there used to be a trade-off," Pritchard explained. "If it was on the network, the I/O was not as accurate as on the rack. You'd like to check status every millisecond, but that would create too much traffic on the network. You could check every 5 to10 ms instead, but then you lose accuracy."

ArmorBlock contains a highly accurate clock with nanosecond accuracy, Pritchard continued. That means that even if status is checked less frequently to relieve network traffic, status is still recorded at finer levels. "You might not know about it for 5 ms, but you will know when it did happen within a nanosecond." In the case of the robotic in-feed module, the I/O checks as product comes through on the belt, enabling the picker robot to grab it as it comes by. "It provides a tenth of a millimeter in accuracy," Pritchard said.

Helping to preserve panel space are two different solutions from Rockwell Automation for servo drives. One solution moves the servo drives from the panel directly to the machine, integrated with the motors. Rather than an eight-axis solution requiring eight drives in the panel connected with 16 wires, the new solution uses a single daisy-chained wire. "This is a dramatic reduction in panel space," Pritchard said, adding, "It provides a significant savings in cable and wiring."

Though Pritchard calls the on-machine servo solution a "pretty compelling technology," there are times when machine builders will want to stick with in-panel servo drives. This could be because a machine design requires very small or very large motors (which the new solution does not accommodate), or the machine builder wants to use linear actuators rather than rotary motors, or simply because of a preference for tradition. Regardless of the reason, Rockwell Automation is coming out with an in-panel servo drive that is significantly smaller than previous drives. The Allen-Bradley Kinetix 5500 servo drive—expected to be released in December—is about half the size of previous solutions, Pritchard said.

Pritchard credits the reduction in size largely to newer transistor technologies (Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors, IGBTs). "They have lower switching losses and produce less heat, so we can pack them a lot tighter in the drive," he explained.

Software Tools Ease Design, Collaboration

Pulling it all together to help machine builders design, build and test their systems, Motion Analyzer is a free, downloadable software tool that integrates with SolidWorks to simulate the physics of a moving system, calculate torque and inertia, and generate digital prototypes. Rockwell Automation is introducing its latest version, Motion Analyzer 7, which integrates support for the latest Rockwell Automation products.

Machine designers will find design and collaboration eased by Studio 5000 Logix Designer, which provides a single design environment rather than single pieces of software. "It's the beginning of an evolution," Pritchard said, explaining that previously the separate software packages worked well together, but Studio 5000 takes that to a new level. "The application modules work in a single environment. You have a single instance of all those design decisions you've made." Studio 5000 will make it easier for everybody on a team—regardless of location—to collaborate on a document, akin to the track changes function in a Word document.

The first element of Studio 5000 will be logic design, scheduled for release next month, Pritchard said. Though it's just one element to start with, "it's the beginning of something big," he added. A panel view designer will be added about a year from now. Topology will be added next, then motion, and so on.