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 over the next ten years. Modern technology has allowed a great deal of intelligence to be built into industrial hardware like drives, but it is networking that allows this intelligence to be used effectively to create self-contained systems intelligent enough to manage themselves without an external controller.
Open networks that allow these sub-systems to interact with the wider world, such as informing operators via email or SMS of an alarm condition, are increasingly important in the industrial arena. In the future, we can expect technologies like Bluetooth and Firewire to allow hand-held devices to perform sophisticated programming and diagnostics tasks.
Ten years is a long time in technology terms, and the next ten will be even more dramatic than the last. But whatever happens, I hope to be invited back to comment on developments in DPA.
Mark Daniels is with Rockwell Automation