Research on High-Performance Three-Axis Robot Control System Based on EtherCAT

At present, for the current market robots above the synchronization performance is poor, the connection is complicated. Domestic mainstream robot companies use CAN bus communication protocols. However, the CAN bus communication protocol has a short data frame and low bandwidth utilization due to high data frequency. The CAN bus protocol has begun to fail to meet the needs of high-precision control. This paper uses the combination of EtherCAT and a three-axis robot to solve the synchronization problem by using EtherCAT's DC mode with high synchronization performance. LAN9252 and STM32H743 chips are used as the ESC and MCU of the slave station for the robot control system design, and the TwinCat provided by Beckhoff is used as the master station. More data can be transmitted in a single cycle for high-precision control of the robot. Synchronization performance is excellent, with jitter levels on the order of microseconds for the master. The error between the slaves is on the order of nanoseconds. EtherCAT has high speed and high synchronization performance, which is a means of communication for high-precision robots. The code provided by BECKhoff has also been partially optimized to solve the problem of EtherCAT's communication error causing the restart.