Networked Motion Control System Design Based on EtherCAT

The application of Industry Ethernet Network in industrial automation domain has gained increasing attentions in recent years due to its high flexibility and performance. However, most of them cannot meet the demand for high-speed motion control. In this paper, a novel networked motion control system which is based on EtherCAT is developed in detail that provide high accurate clock synchronization and the extremely high performance which classic fieldbus systems cannot realize. Experimental results for a laboratory-scale factory indicate that the proposed control system can perform well in real-time data transmission, that is, accomplishing the synchronous communication over 10 slave nodes within 1ms.