Motion is where automation stops being logic and starts being physics.
A servo sized on the peak instead of the cycle overheats in week three. An axis with a bad inertia ratio cannot be tuned by anybody, however good they are. A cam that looks elegant on screen tears the mechanism apart, because nobody checked its second derivative.
This book is written for the person who has to make the machine move - and then defend the choices in front of a customer.
It starts at the physical axis and works outward:
- **The axis itself** - motor, feedback, drive and load; what a torque-speed curve actually permits; and why "how many kilowatts" is almost always the wrong question.
- **Sizing you can defend** - reflected inertia through gearbox, belt, screw and rack; the duty cycle; RMS torque; the peak checked at the speed where it occurs; derating; and the regeneration you have to put somewhere.
- **The loops** - the cascade and what each layer really does, tuning as a repeatable procedure with a defined stopping point instead of folklore, and resonance, backlash and compliance diagnosed as what they are: problems that tuning cannot solve.
- **Motion inside the program** - the PLCopen state machine as a vendor-neutral backbone, then the same job in three dialects, electronic gearing to a virtual master, cam profiles designed rather than guessed, and print-registration correction with a hardware latch.
>Every hands-on section runs in the **free CODESYS lab**, with the Siemens TIA Portal and Rockwell Studio 5000 equivalents shown alongside and the divergences named honestly rather than smoothed over. Thirty-seven original diagrams. Every chapter ends with review questions, answers in the back.
A field companion to The Modern PLC Series. Those four volumes build a plant and treat its motion cell as a sealed box reporting two signals. This book opens the box.