Integrated Drive and Control

驱控一体Advanced

Combining a motor's driver and its motion controller into a single hardware unit.

In a traditional industrial robot, the motion controller (which computes trajectories and does planning) and each axis's servo drive (which energizes the motor) are separate boxes connected by a bus. Integrated drive and control means merging the two onto one board or into one cabinet: the control algorithm and the current loop run on the same processor or the same module, eliminating the communication step between them. The benefits are a smaller footprint, less wiring, lower cost, and shorter control latency, which helps with high-bandwidth force control. At the joint level, the term is also often used for integrating the driver directly into the joint module itself, so each joint carries its own “drive plus control” and the layer above only needs to send commands over EtherCAT or CAN. The integrated joints used in humanoid robots and collaborative arms are essentially built on this idea.

Also called: Drive-Control Integration
Related: Servo Drive (Motor Driver) · Joint Actuator Module · Robot Controller · EtherCAT (Ethernet for Control Automation Technology) · Compute-Control Integration
Sources: Servo drive - Wikipedia
Motor controller - Wikipedia