Sercos International, supplier of the Sercos automation bus, will present new products, innovative technologies and updates regarding safety plus a robotic demo from Schneider Electric at its joint booth at SPS IPC Drives Italy from May 24-26 in Hall 2, Booth D070.

The robotic solution consists of a fully stainless-steel PacDrive P4-robot and an MAXR gantry robot. Both are part of Schneider Electric’s line of robotics products. The 3-axis P4 delta robot sets the gaming pieces while the 3-axis portal moves the board with its additional rotary axis. To perform this task, the P4 robot has to synchronize four mechanically coupled axes (3 linear, 1 rotary). After each automatic move by the robot, the visitor sets his gaming piece using the human-machine interface. This allows the visitor to play an active role in the game and in the robot’s actions. A Magelis handheld touch panel serves as the operational interface.

All robot axes are driven by Lexium motors, controlled  by PacDrive 3 servo drives from the Lexium 62 multi-axis servo solution. The entire demo machine is controlled by a PacDrive LMC 600 controller, which communicates with the servo drives via the Sercos automation bus.

Another highlight will be the Sercos III SoftMaster demo, which was developed in cooperation with Bosch Rexroth, ISG Industrielle Steuerungstechnik and Tenasys.

The SoftMaster demo will show how the highest speed and hard real-time can be achieved using a standard Ethernet controller. High performance and the highest determinism can be achieved due to a controller which supports queues and scheduling, for example the Intel i210. Ring topologies and redundancies are also reliably supported and functional limitations are no longer valid. Sercos cycle times up to 125µs are possible.

Customers will benefit from free usage and elimination of licensing costs because the Sercos SoftMaster is available as Open Source Software. Another advantage is that special modules are not needed, so the controller hardware can be designed extremely compactly and cost-effectively because the SoftMaster runs on any platform.

Some renowned companies are already implementing their first projects with the Sercos III SoftMaster in cooperation with Bosch Rexroth AG. Among others, a packaging machine manufacturer is so enthusiastic about this technology that the company is planning to convert its entire machine program to the technology in time for Interpack 2017.