Ten years ago this month, DPA asked Reliance Electric's Paul Claxton for
his thoughts on where drive technology was heading. Industry has seen
many changes over the subsequent years, not least of which was Reliance's
acquisition by Rockwell Automation. So, we asked Mark Daniels to share
his thoughts on drives technology past, present and future
Paul Claxton's forward-looking assessment of digital drives technology
proved strikingly prophetic. All the features that he identified in his
article, such as diagnostics, monitoring and configuring a drive
remotely, will be instantly recognisable to today's engineers. In fact,
industrial technology has progressed in some areas, if not beyond the
wildest dreams of engineers ten years ago, then very much further than
would have been thought possible. But the journey between vision and
reality has not been an easy one.
The story of digital drive technology is, in essence, the story of
industrial networks. Compared to a decade ago, today's drives pack an
incredible amount of processing power. But today's industrial environment
is not just about making machines smarter; it's also about making them
work together better. Many of the ideas Paul identified, such as remote
diagnostics and configuring drives over a network, are now standard
features. But besides adding intelligence at machine level, the greatest
advances - and perhaps the greatest future challenges - lay with the
evolution of truly integrated systems.
The impact of the Internet during the nineties was perhaps the most
profound technology event of a generation. Conceptually, the idea of
linking computers together has been around since the sixties, but it took
the development of a whole host of different technologies, standards and
protocols to arrive at the computer networks that today are so much part
of our everyday lives. In any period of evolution, competition for
supremacy is fierce. The development and evolution of industrial
networking technology to its present level was no exception.
The ideas articulated by Paul Claxton illustrate the common vision that
united manufacturers at the time. The idea of being able to configure,
control and manage devices remotely was, and still is, enormously
attractive. But while manufacturers might have shared a common aim, they
had very different ideas about how to go about achieving it. Hence the
emergence of a plethora of incompatible proprietary protocols and
standards - the infamous 'fieldbus wars' of the mid-nineties. While they
may have settled into an uneasy truce, their influence still affects the
future development of industrial technology.
Communications and interoperability lie at the heart of industrial
technology development, as multi-tier and peer-to-peer networking becomes
more prevalent. Yet, the legacy of the fieldbus wars means that true
connectivity is still to be achieved. While Ethernet holds promise as the
universal strategy for the 21st Century, there are still more than 20
different 'flavours ' of industrial Ethernet. The reason why so many
variations still exist is that industrial automation poses many more
demands than the office automation for which much of today's proprietary
Ethernet hardware was developed.
Applications like motion control require real-time deterministic data and
clock synchronisation to the microsecond. The industrial environment is
much harsher than a cosy office and plant network topologies typically
differ from office ones. These factors, by definition, differentiate
industrial Ethernet from its white-collar cousin. However, support for
Ethernet I/P as the standard industrial Ethernet is a very encouraging
sign that we may, at last, be on the way to achieving true universal
connectivity.
There is no doubt that the sharing of information between devices and
decentralised system intelligence will continue to be a central aspect of
drive development ove