It has become fashionable lately for some U.S. companies to tout how they’ve reshored production from overseas. Baldor Electric Co. isn’t one of them—it never left. The company has been manufacturing electric motors, drives, bearings and other motion control products in the United States for decades.
Synchronization is an essential element of both symphony orchestras and football teams. It’s also important to the success of high-speed assembly lines.
Traditionally, a complex manufacturing machine has one large, powerful controller that governs sequencing, motion and I/O. Multiple drives and motors are connected to the controller via a motion network.
Fifty milliseconds may not seem like a lot of time. Indeed, the human eye takes between 300 and 400 milliseconds to complete a single blink. And yet in the context of a high-speed automated assembly system, in which a single linear actuator might make more than a dozen moves per minute, 50 milliseconds here and there can really add up.