AX-100

Agile Planet offers a line of EtherCAT motion and IO control solutions that offer plug-and-play connectivity to Rockwell Automation PLC's. The powerful Kinematix™ motion engine built in to AX controllers supports general purpose motion and robot control with articulated robots up to 7 axes. The AX controllers combine the Kinematix™ motion engine from Agile Planet and an EtherCAT master.

The EtherCAT master controller can be either:

• A dedicated IPC (AX-100) that controls motion and IO.
• A soft controller that can deployed on an IPC with Windows CE 6.0 (AX-Soft)

All AX controllers include a Windows configuration utility for setting up individual axes and defining axes groups or robot geometry. Tuning of the servos is performed using the servo vendor tuning tools.

• Up to 32 fully synchronized axes using a distributed clock with jitter better than 0.1 microsecond.
• Various qualified third party IO components.
• Third party servo drives that support CAN application protocol over EtherCAT (CoE).
• Complex kinematic transformations already built in for different robot types. Simple configuration utility for specifying robot geometry and mass properties.

Programming of the AX controller can be performed using two powerful application development environments:

• C/C++ using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. In this case, application logic executes on the AX-100 IPC or on the user PC if AX-Soft is used. Developers can easily create their own HMI using the .NET environment.
• An AX controller can be connected to a Rockwell PLC/PAC and all application programming can then be performed using RSLogix 5000. AX software development kit for Rockwell includes RSLogix 5000 ladder instructions for motion programming and IO. This capability allows the use of Rockwell IO, Networking, and HMI in conjunction with EtherCAT servo drives and other EtherCAT peripherals.