Design And Implementation Of Motion Controller’s Communication System Based On EtherCAT

With the development of embedded technology, industrial Ethernet developsrapidly. Motion control system based on the traditional field-bus cannot meet therequirements of real-time and high synchronization accuracy. The traditional field-bus also has a weakness: lack of uniform standards and lack of openness. Tointegrate the industrial Ethernet technology to the motion control system hasbecome a trend and a new hotspot. The design of a new type motion controllerbased on the Industrial Ethernet is good for the further development of multi-axissynchronous control system, and has great significance and application value.In this paper, the author makes a comprehensive analysis of the mainstreamindustrial Ethernet technology, and applies a real-time industrial Ethernet-EtherCATto motion control systems. Then, the paper studies the EtherCAT bus technologyand gives a master solution and a slave solution in motion controller. This paperuses TI’s AM3359as the microprocessor of the master controller and gives ahardware design about network interface. A software master is designed underLinux and runs on this ARM platform, and the software architecture is divided intothree modules: hardware driver module, master module and the application module.This paper describes the design and implementation like state machine, distributedclock synchronization and bus configuration functions. The hardware design ofslave based on ARM and FPGA, the main processor is AM3359and the coprocessoris CycloneIII EP3C16Q240C8N. This paper give the design of the physical layermodule and data-link layer module of EtherCAT communication system.The ARMunit is used for application layer design of the software.Finally, the author builds a communication platform of EtherCAT-based motioncontroller with the master and the standard EtherCAT servo drives, use Ethernetanalyzer and Wireshark to analysis the performance of the EtherCAT bus and makea performance comparison to CAN bus. At last, the author make a analysis of thepulse control signal Crawled by the master and slave communication platform. Finalexperimental results show that the hardware and software design is feasible toachieve the desired objectives.