Global consumer and economic development trends are driving the demand of factories to improve flexibility, productivity and efficiency. With the rapid development of Industry 4.0, robots are driven to become more collaborative and intelligent, and automation equipment are driven to better undertake complex tasks. This article will show you the development direction of industrial robots and automation technology, and how the solutions introduced by ADI can help automation applications become more intelligent and efficient.
Three Trends Drive the Rapid Development of Industrial Robots
Advanced robot technology is improving the productivity of factories and achieving safer human-computer interaction. It is driving the revolutionary development of industrial robots in the fields of motion control, functional safety, advanced sensing and system level design. The trend of accelerating the adoption of robots can be divided into the following three categories.
First of all, under the trend of globalization, in order to respond to changes in consumer behavior and expectations, as well as the increase in customization demand and faster turnaround time, manufacturers are being forced to change their operation methods, including more localized manufacturing facilities, designs and production lines, which can be rapidly reconfigured for different product types and batch sizes, so as to enhance the flexibility of factories. In addition, manufacturers are also facing the problems of skilled labor shortage, aging workforces and high employee turnover. As a result, manufacturers must turn to automation and flexibility to keep up with demand and remain competitive.
Secondly, the installation and operation of traditional industrial robots is very complex, but cooperative robots (cobots) can work with humans and are easier to install. In the past, enterprises had to pay professional engineers to installing and commissioning robots over several days, but now they can set up cobots without the assistance of experts. In addition, as robots become more affordable and the return on investment in automation is increasing, the open architecture makes it easier to build robots and greatly improves the popularity of robot applications.
Additionally, with the pandemic of COVID-19, the flexibility of the production line has become a necessary and key consideration. The adoption of cobots allows rapid and seamless changes through plug-and-play interfaces and simple and rapid reprogramming, thus allowing robots to be redeployed from existing task to something new. In addition, workers must maintain a safe social distance and adopt higher cleaning and disinfection procedures, while we do not have to worry about this problem in the case of robots, which brings new opportunities for workplaces that may have never used robots before.
Robots Help Human Beings Complete Dull, Dirty and Dangerous Work
Robots mainly assist human beings to complete dull, dirty and dangerous work, so as to prevent injury or adverse health effects caused by working under dangerous conditions. In addition, if the work is repetitive and boring, humans often make mistakes, sometimes causing physical injury to themselves, while robots can repeat the same work without making mistakes. Therefore, robots can liberate humans to perform more creative knowledge work, rather than doing dull and repetitive work.
Additionally, robots are also deployed in increasingly dangerous work, such as bridge inspections, chemical spills, and cleanup. Robots can move in dangerous areas and send information back to the command center to avoid accidents and heavy casualties. In addition, judging from the current pandemic, robots can also make the supply chain more stable. Automated factories using robots are less affected by the pandemic. Enterprises no longer need large factories with cheap labor, reducing the impact of the pandemic on the supply chain.
Robots are widely used in factories. For example, in functional safety applications, robots used to be separated from workers and placed in safety cages, but now some robots can directly interact with or approach humans. Some robots using smart grippers and end effectors have expanded the work fields that robots can perform. Some plug-and-play connector interfaces can achieve ease of use and rapid tool replacement. Accurate force and torque sensing and measurement can improve the productivity of robots.
In the application of condition-based monitoring, machine and system abnormalities can be detected and diagnosed early through real-time monitoring. The future smart factory needs immersive cooperation between human workers and automation equipment. The use of deep sensing solutions is very important for quality inspection, personal safety, volume inspection of asset management and guidance of independent manufacturing.
In addition, industrial communication also plays an important role in robot applications. Wired connection and wireless connection technologies can be used. In addition, driver/inverter control, power and battery management technologies are also required to improve the operation efficiency of robots.
Comprehensive Promotion of the Revolution of Robotics
ADI has been committed to promoting various technologies of the robot revolution to improve the productivity of workshops, using ADI's scalable platform technology and software solutions to optimize the control system to improve efficiency, and cooperating with robots safely to help customers create a journey of digital transformation.
Digitizing the factory floor can improve productivity by improving operations, such as the autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) for material handling, which will make the material handling process in the factory more intelligent and flexible. Using ADI's MEMS sensing, intelligent processing, 3D time of flight (ToF) and machine learning technologies, AMR can safely and autonomously move materials without physical guides or markers.
ADI's condition-based monitoring solutions, such as Voyager 3, are eliminating unplanned downtime and extending asset lifetime. ADI has an end-to-end solution that enables robust and reliable monitoring of various parameters to determine the state of health of assets, including ADI OtoSense™, which is a complete turnkey hardware and software solution based on AI.
In addition, cobots that can work with humans improve productivity and promote consistency in output quality. Using innovative vision sensing technology and sophisticated algorithms, ADI is realizing more efficient operation and safer factory floors for humans.
The connected enterprises require that all devices deployed in the factory floor be connected to the central control system and connected to the enterprise cloud. ADI's wired and wireless solutions can reliably capture new high bandwidth data streams and real-time communication control commands to realize the interconnection of production cells. ADI's time sensitive network (TSN) technology is realizing the interoperability of IT and OT network convergence.
Motion control is the core component of smart manufacturing, which supports agility and sustainability. ADI Trinamic's motion control expertise in low-voltage DC and stepper motors, combined with ADI's leading technology in medium and high-power AC drives and servo systems, can achieve new intelligent motion solutions.
Complete Key Technologies and Solutions for Industrial Automation
ADI's key technologies and solutions for industrial automation are committed to solving automation challenges of today and tomorrow, providing the highest performance precision analog devices, and using ADI precision technology to accurately measure real-world signals, to accurately control, monitor and interpret various low bandwidth and wide bandwidth signals found in automation equipment. ADI's portfolio of high-precision analog converters, linear and signal conditioning portfolio provides products that meet all requirements in terms of performance, power, cost and size.
ADI's leading sensing technology can support and enhance industrial systems to achieve precise positioning, safer human and machines collaboration, and real-time asset health monitoring. MEMS accelerometer can accurately detect acceleration, tilt, shock and vibration, while ADI's 3D ToF image sensing platform can realize high-quality remote depth sensing. Featuring low noise, high resolution and low delay, ADI's 3D ToF depth sensing technology is promoting machine vision in AMR and collaborative robot deployment for object detection, dimensioning and obstacle avoidance.
ADI's extensive portfolio of power management products provides small form factor and high-efficiency smart power solutions, while reducing energy consumption, making low-carbon footprint production a reality. From nanoamps to megawatts, ADI's power products and design tools can help customers accelerate time to market while providing best-in-class performance and reliability.
ADI's digital isolators, isolated transceivers, isolated ADCs, and isolated gate drivers utilize iCoupler®, isoPower® and µModule® BGA digital isolation technologies to enable a robust, reliable and safe system.
The use of ADI's ultra-low power and safe microcontroller is a customized resource optimization processing solution, which can improve the intelligence and functionality of end equipment. It is very suitable for edge node devices such as field instruments, robot equipment and condition monitoring platforms.
ADI's products used in robotics and automation are quite diverse and comprehensive. The following section will focus on several ADI products for your reference.
High-performance Isolated SiC Gate Driver
ADI ADuM4146 is an isolated SiC (silicon carbide) gate driver with integrated Miller clamp, which is optimized for enhanced 1500 V isolation for high-performance SiC applications. This single channel gate driver is optimized for driving SiC MOSFET and allows unipolar or bipolar operation. It provides isolation between the input signal and the output gate drive using iCoupler® technology.
ADuM4146 integrates a desaturation detection circuit to provide protection against high-voltage short-circuit SiC operation. If higher noise immunity is required, the internal blanking switch allows the addition of an external current source, and the secondary undervoltage lockout (UVLO) is set to the common SiC level.
The integrated Miller clamp can take full advantage of the faster switching speed of SiC by preventing the conduction caused by Miller effect. ADuM4146 has the industry-leading common mode transient immunity (CMTI), which can ensure that no gate timing error occurs during fast switching. It has faster switching and no shoot through or timing error caused by dV/dt, which improves the efficiency of the power converter.
ADuM4146 can be widely used in SiC Power module, power supply, photovoltaic inverter, and motor drive. It has the fastest short circuit protection (SCP) response time in the industry, as well as improved DESAT blanking and noise response. It supports DESAT fault reporting and soft shutdown. ADuM4146 is a high-speed SiC device switching solution that supports bipolar drive (negative supply), including the third generation SiC devices for +15 V/–3 V. It supports internal Miller clamping, and is used for an integrated solution to reduce the number of components. High CMTI (150 kV/µs min) ensures that the gate driver can withstand the high dV/dt of SiC devices.
EVAL-ADuM4146WHB1Z can be used to evaluate ADuM4146. This is a half-bridge grid driver board, which can drive the advanced Wolfspeed third-generation C3M™ SiC MOSFET and power module to simply evaluate the performance of ADuM4146. EVAL-ADuM4146WHB1Z can be used in combination with Wolfspeed's clamped inductive load (CIL) test board or half bridge evaluation board and differential transceiver board.
EVAL-ADuM4146WHB1Z has been optimized for Wolfspeed SiC MOSFET and power module, is compatible with Wolfspeed CIL test board and half bridge evaluation board, supports high-frequency and ultrafast switching operation, has differential input to improve noise immunity, provides input and output side UVLO, supports short-circuit protection, shoot-through protection interlocking, internal Miller clamping, has fault and ready indicator, and can measure isolated NTC thermistor, and uses 12 V power input.
Advanced Highly Integrated AMR Sensor
ADI ADA4570 is an anisotropic magnetoresistive (AMR) sensor with an integrated signal conditioning amplifier and analog-to-digital converter (ADC) driver. The ADA4570 can generate four analog outputs to indicate the angular position of the surrounding magnetic field, which are combined to form a single sensing channel.
The ADA4570 consists of two die within one package, an AMR sensor, and a fixed gain instrument amplifier. The ADA4570 can provide clean and amplified differential cosine and sine output signals related to the rotating magnetic field angle. The output voltage range is ratio metric to the power supply voltage. The on-chip temperature sensor is used to correct the changes of the sensor with temperature changes.
The ADA4570 can be used in a variety of applications, including those requiring absolute position measurement (linear angle and linear), such as brushless DC (BLDC) motor control and positioning, actuator control, contactless angular measurement and magnetic angular position sensing.
Open Source Hardware Reference Design of BLDC Servo Driver
ADI TMCM-1617-GRIP-REF is an open source hardware reference design of TMCM-1617 BLDC servo driver. For robot gripper applications, the board is designed as a standard gripper electronic form-factor to control a BLDC motor through EtherCAT®, IO-Link® or Trinamic’s RS485-based TMCL protocol. In addition, the board also has configurable analog output and input channels, as well as configurable digital output and input channels, using Maxim's MAX22000 and MAX14906 industrial IO solutions.
TMCM-1617-GRIP-R.EF can be used to evaluate a single axis BLDC servo driver. It supports motor current of up to 2.5A RMS, adopts +24V nominal supply voltage (+20V to +28V), supports digital Hall sensor interface, ABN encoder interface, has 4 digital +24V I/Os (high side switch, push-pull driver, or Type 1 and 3, or Type 2 digital inputs), and 1 analog output (±12.5V output voltage range, or ±25mA or ±2.5mA output current range). There is also one differential analog input (±15V, ±2.5V, ±500mV, ±250mV and ±125mV input voltage range) that can be applied to the robot gripper.
Conclusion
With the rapid development of robotics, humans can be liberated from dull, dirty and dangerous work to engage in more creative and valuable work. For robotics and automation applications, ADI has introduced advanced and comprehensive products and solutions to provide substantial and effective assistance in realizing the vision of Industry 4.0, which also represents unlimited business opportunities in the broad application market behind it.