Arcus Servo Motion: Leading The Industry 4.0 In Motion

Real World Application using TITAN and 2ndSight

To put things into perspective, a kiosk company call Basil Street Café with Automated Pizza Kitchen is planning to introduce thousands of machines in the U.S. leveraged with TITAN Servo and 2ndSight. According to Jeff Klemp COO for Basil Street and Commercial Automation, “Motor controllers are a central component of any complex motion control project, especially one that involves coordinating the movements of 11+ motors, such as the ones in the Basil Street Automated Pizza Kitchen. Early in the project we faced many technical unknowns and faced a very tight deadline, so it was critical to choose a motion control platform that was both flexible and reliable. Not yet knowing exactly what types of motors we would end up with, we selected the Arcus Titan product line for its ability to work seamlessly with a variety of brushless DC and stepper motors. We also liked its ability to accept both standard quadrature encoder feedback and even simple Hall sensor feedback for full closed-loop control. Multiple Titan controllers could be networked together, allowing us to scale a solution for one motor up to many dozen motors, all utilizing a common communication interface and protocol. The Titan line also offers comprehensive automatic and manual tuning capabilities and system identification tools, to maximize our chances of successfully controlling motors and mechanical systems with unknown characteristics and dynamics.” Jeff continues, “Beyond the hardware capabilities of the Arcus controllers and the robustness of their design, other qualities that appealed to us was the ability of the Arcus controllers to be commanded by a central PC running the kiosk, as well as the ability to execute high-performance microcode directly on the controller processors themselves, offering a balance between autonomy and centralization. Over the long term, the Arcus 2ndSight analytic technology is a promising tool that will allow us to monitor the health of the kiosks and predict failures before they occur, to maximize the uptime of our machines. Our team having worked with Arcus products for 4 years now, is continually impressed by the quality of Arcus engineering, their responsiveness to customer feedback, and their willingness to customize a solution that fits our needs.”

Moving toward a Promising Future

With such robust offerings, Arcus Servo Motion is all set to jump to the next level. “Once market acceptance and use of 2ndSight are established through TITAN, we expect products and services based on 2ndSight to become the major revenue source for the company,” Chris adds. He believes that the motion controllers that are commonly available in the market do not have intelligent algorithms embedded or implemented to obtain insights. That’s why the company has currently set the goal to implement 2ndSight technology into all machines and motors controllers across the globe and take machine automation to the next level. Undoubtedly, it will up the ante for the entire manufacturing sector—with Arcus Servo Motion being the torchbearer. In a nutshell, the future of the manufacturing industry lies in automation, where businesses will have to enable a smooth production line to gain a competitive edge in the market. And Arcus Servo Motion, with its innovative offerings, will play a vital role in streamlining that journey.