MORE ACCURACY WITH VISION IN THE GANTRY LOOP

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MORE ACCURACY WITH VISION IN THE GANTRY LOOP
15 July 2002 - Nyquist Industrial Control

With Motion, Vision and simple mechanics you can create a faster and more adaptable mechanism that ultimately has an even greater accuracy. Nyquist Industrial Control, Technobis and Philips CFT have shown this in a new Gantry demonstration. By bringing Vision into the Nyquist feedforward loop, you gain a lot of processing time so that the machine can be made faster and more adaptable.

The four motors, on which the demo runs, are from maxon motor (two for the x-axis, one for the y-axis and one for the φ). Philips CFT supplied the intelligent camera, Technobis provided the mechanical construction and the analogue Motion Controller is from Nyquist. The system also runs on the digital MX3000 Motion Controller from Nyquist in combination with the maxon motors and drives.

The intelligent camera is connected, via a FireWire backbone with a peer-to-peer coupling, directly to the Motion Controller. The Vision process is not centrally executed in the host PC anymore, but is located in the camera. Formerly, bringing in the inputs took too long for generating outputs. By making the camera intelligent and a FireWire connection, the Motion Controller gets positioning information from the pictures. By bringing Vision into the loop in this way, a lot of processing time is gained so that the machine can be made faster and more adaptable. It can react to exceptional behaviour by changing its path movements on the fly. In the demonstration this is shown by allowing it to move the model without losing the pointing mechanism. In the end even a higher accuracy is reached.

The intelligent camera, together with the Gantry mechanism, constantly follows the user-designed figure, even if the figure is moved by the user's hand. The camera is moved in the x- and y directions by the Technobis economical linear Technolin mechanisms (with which they won the Dutch A&B Award in 2000) together with maxon motors. The maxon motors are controlled by the Motion Controller from Nyquist (left below), which gets its signals from the camera via FireWire. The user interface of the application is the standard Nyquist NYCeTalk software tool (top left monitor). The camera image (Vision) you see on the top right monitor.

http://www.nyquist.com

About: Nyquist Industrial Control
Nyquist has a long and rich history. A history that goes back to the beginning of the early seventies, when the company was still part of Philips. Since then, the organisation has played a pioneering role in the field of high-quality Motion Control systems, VME and PLC machine control platforms.

The foundations for the present-day company Nyquist Industrial Control were paved in the seventies. This happened when the first standardised servo system was developed, initially created for Philips' internal machine building. This led to a large international installed base, both within and outside of our own organisation. For instance, the doors of the Dutch Railways' trains are still fitted with VME-based control systems from Nyquist. And then just think of all the automatically opening bridges, traction systems, trams, machines for making glass moulds, embroidering machinery, pastry-making machines, ships' terminals, incinerators and water purification plants.

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