Research On Reconfigurable Manufacturing Cell Control Technology Based On EtherCAT Architecture

For the problem of the rapid layout of manufacturing cells in Ether CAT applications,and it lacks a low-cost configuration-based rapid layout and device control method for the current PC control scheme,a rapid reconstruction solution is proposed in this paper,and it provides hardware and software implementation methods which include reconfigurable slave devices and PC controllers.Then according to the proposed hardware and software methods,some experimental platforms have been established to verify the feasibility of the solution.The main research work of this article includes:Firstly,by studying the Ether CAT communication architecture,from the perspective of enhancing the expansion capability of the equipment module in the manufacturing cell system,an open design scheme based on the slave station equipment model is proposed,which based on the normalization of "everything is a slave".Secondly,according to the goal of system reconstruction,the implementation method of the reconstruction feature of the slave device is analyzed from the time dimension,platform dimension and application dimension,then the hardware circuit of the Ether CAT slave device module based on STM32 and LAN9252 is designed,and the corresponding software is developed.The design of the slave station module adopts a modular layered architecture,each module of software or hardware is "assembled" by multiple submodules,and the loose coupling relationship between the modules is ensured through layered management.In addition,in order to speed up the digitization process of the slave device in the PC controller,the module adopts the redundant design and event communication,and uses the Bresenham algorithm to realize the multi-axis interpolation application in the embedded platform,which provides application foundation of open control for the PC controller.Thirdly,an open PC-type controller is designed,which based on the open source Ether CAT master.In the system,the network configuration of the slave station module is realized through SII,and the application can be expanded by the virtual mapping of slots and nodes.In addition,the controller integrates a G code interpreter,and supports standard G code for control.Therefore,the designed PC-type controller has the characteristics of low cost,good versatility,high control accuracy and easy expansion,and the rapid layout function of the system provides the conditions for reconstruction of manufacturing cells.Fourthly,on the basis of the designed PC-type controller,a control scheme for node access of unit devices has been implemented.By separating the functions of the control object model,it can transfer the system’s control process of each hardware slave into a generalized data access process for each slave’s abstract node,and the device’s drive model can be automatically loaded to drive the manufacturing cell equipment in an efficient and flexible manner to complete complex Control tasks.At the same time,the whole solution also provides a variety of virtual slave interaction methods;it supports script language for relationship description,and can communicate with some modeling software such as MATLAB to speed up the application development process.Finally,according to the described hardware and software solutions,some relevant experiments have been done to illustrate the feasibility of the solution,which can achieve rapid layout and effective control of multiple device nodes.From the experiments,the proposed method has the characteristics of low cost,cross-platform,small dependence,flexible expansion and easy to achieve.Therefore the proposed method meets the target needs of the system.