Research On Communication Technology Of Industrial Robot Based On EtherCAT

With the arrival of the Industry 4.0 and the development of intelligent factory, the industrial robot control system has developed towards the direction of open, embedded, low cost, high speed and overloading. And due to the advantage of fast speed, large data capacity, strong real-time performanc and high reliability and low cost, the Industrial Ethernet has become an important development direction of current industrial robot technology. As one of the Industrial Ethernet, Ether CAT was proposed by the German BECKHOFF automation company in 2003, with the characteristics of high speed, high data efficiency, supporting a variety of physical topology, simple networking and so on. It has been widely used in high-speed printing, injection molding, packaging, machine tools, solder and other high-speed applications, as well as the logistics, data collection, materials and other occasions of vast distribution.In this article, the communication technology of industrial robot was taken as the starting point. On the basis of the comprehensive and systematic research on Industrial Ethernet technology, the Ether CAT bus technology and embedded system ?C/OS-III was combined, the structure of Ether CAT communication system was discussed, and the Ether CAT embedded master controller with low cost and high efficiency is designed, which is used for realizing the control of Ether CAT slave station equipment. This article focuses on the research and design of Ether CAT embedded master controller.On the side of the master station's hardware, ARM chip STM32F407 produced by the semiconductor(ST) corporation is used as the core processor, Ethernet MAC controller chip DM9000 is used as the network card chip, as well as other external resources. On the side of the master station's software, the real-time embedded operating system ?C/OS-III is used as the underlying system, which mainly implements Ether CAT master protocol, including the transplantation of ?C/OS-III operating system with multi task scheduling, the design of Ethernet Driver wh ich connects hardware and peripheral for communication, the realization of non-periodic and periodic data communication of master station, the realization of distributed clock mechanism.At last, on the basis of the realization of the embedded master station, experimental platform is built to test the Ether CAT network communication, real-time, stability and synchronization. The results meet the requirements of high speed and high precision motion control of industrial robots, and laid the foundation for the further research of the industrial robot communication technolog.