TECHNICAL NOTE
MOTION APPLICATION ENGINEERING GROUP
Yaskawa Electric America - 2121 Norman Drive South – Waukegan IL 60085
(800) YASKAWA - Fax (847) 887-7280
11/23/2005
4 of 4
eng/05.055/MCD
MP MACHINE CONTROLLER PROGRAMMING BEST PRACTICES
OVERVIEW
Why Use a Yaskawa Machine Controller?
General automation machine controllers are beneficial in that they offer a unique flexibility for
programming the operation of functions and sequences within a machine. Whether the
application warrants high performance point-to-point indexing, discrete motion operations,
continuous motion operations, or complex scan based motion profiling with on-the-fly phase
shifting – all benefit from tightly coupled motion and machine sequence logic control. As factory
floor production requirements increase, machine cells must also increase their own production
capability, and precise control of complex motion becomes vitally important to insure production
rates are met and continue high quality product yield.
Many independent PLCs and Motion Controllers reach a limitation when programmers strive to
achieve these new and improved line production performance benchmarks, and unfortunately
result in a bottleneck when trying to increase the performance of a system. This bottleneck can
often be caused by control systems latencies in data handshaking or lack of synchronization, not
only from cell controller to cell controller, but also within a single controllers functional module
interfacing. A good machine control platform tightly couples high performance motion control
capabilities with machine sequence logic, and provides the foundation and scalability necessary
to achieve performance in a changing environment.
True machine control tightly integrates the following: high and low performance features, priority
setting and adjustment, determinism and predictability, synchronization of tasks / processors /
networks, high execution rates, scalability without sacrificing performance, integration of
peripheral components, and a focus on precise motion control. The result is smooth motion, less
machine jerk, less mechanical vibration, less heating, smaller and more efficient motor sizes,
higher machine reliability and longer life cycles – all with the advantage of built in future
expansion.
To take advantage of the power of total machine synchronization and extend this capability
across a wide range of performance requirements - from low performance, low cost machines to
high performance, higher priced machines, a scalable machine control platform is offered by
Yaskawa: the MP Series Machine Controller. To harness the power of flexibility and performance
while maintaining an overall ease of use, Yaskawa also introduces the MP Machine Controller
MP Programming Best Practices Guideline.
What’s in MP Programming Best Practices Guideline?
This document is a guideline to lead the controls engineer down a successful path that will not
only increase programming productivity for any given machine, but also an entire line of
complementary machines which can be offered for different user requirements. It outlines and
encourages the use of best practices by some of the top motion and machine control engineers
of the MP product line, including its predecessors. This document helps the programmer to
realize the benefits of following best practices: