Kollmorgen Looks at the Mechatronic Approach to Designing Motion as a System

When people talk about mechatronics, it’s often framed as something futuristic — the next big leap in automation. In truth, it describes something engineers have been working toward for decades: designing machines where the mechanical, electrical, and control systems work together as one. Arne Linder, product manager, drives at Kollmorgen, explores the benefits and key aspects of applying a mechatronic approach to designing motion systems.

A mechatronic approach looks at the entire system as a single organism where the motor, drive, controller, and software are not just compatible, but interconnected. Correctly applied to today’s motion systems, this concept can deliver greater precision, faster commissioning, and easier long-term support.

You can see this in how advanced machines are now designed and developed. Rather than treating electrical, mechanical, and control engineering as separate stages, they’re part of one continuous process: from virtual design and simulation to physical commissioning and maintenance. Each discipline informs the others, and the result is a machine that moves, and evolves, as a unified system.

For a long time, setting up a servo system meant – rather ironically, for automation projects – doing everything by hand. Engineers had to enter the motor parameters into the drive manually, refer to look-up tables, and hope nothing was mistyped. Small errors in those numbers could lead to poor performance, instability, or unexpected behavior. Even something as minor as a misplaced decimal point could have catastrophic consequences and potentially even cause a motor to damage itself or rapidly overheat.

Modern systems, such as Kollmorgen’s own SFD-M feedback device, can take much of that risk away. Today, a properly designed setup can allow the motor and drive to automatically identify and configure each other, loading the correct parameters for torque, current, and speed control without the needs for slow (and potentially incorrect) manual entry. That not only saves time but ensures that the system performs as designed from the first test move.

This is what we think of as the first stage of mechatronic integration: getting the key elements to cooperate automatically. It may sound simple, but it represents a big step forward for commissioning and consistency. The engineer can focus less on configuration and more on the dynamics of the machine itself.

The next step is bringing that same simplicity to the control layer. Many OEMs have long-standing automation environments and communication protocols they prefer to use. That’s why many of our modern drives are built to operate agnostically, communicating across multiple industrial networks by default. For those developing entirely new systems, fully integrated environments such as the Kollmorgen Automation Suite make it possible to handle motion, PLC logic, safety, and visualization within a single workspace. It’s a practical example of mechatronics in action – combining mechanical intent and digital control in one place.

One of the key aspects of mechatronics is being able to understand how components fit together and perform. This is somewhere that modeling and simulation tools can deliver huge benefits, as they allow engineers to explore motor and drive combinations virtually, predicting performance before any hardware is deployed. Later, when motion control and PLC logic are developed in an integrated software environment, coordinated motion even can be tested and refined virtually - often before a control cabinet has even been wired.

And once the machine is operational, a well-integrated system can help to dramatically simplify maintenance and support. For example, when components from multiple vendors are stitched together, identifying the source of a fault can be time-consuming and uncertain – the motor manufacturer says the issue must be caused by the controller, the controller supplier blames the drive, and so on.

The ability to connect the physical and digital worlds will only become more important. The growing use of simulation and digital twins aims to bring mechanical, electrical, and control design into a single virtual environment where a complete machine can be tested and validated before a prototype is built. While experience tells us that removing physical testing entirely is unlikely to be the case, each step toward deeper integration brings us closer to incredibly optimized designs out of the box.

kollmorgen.com