Leaders from various industries received latest information on Sercos at SPS IPC Drives in Nuremberg, Germany

The new Sercos® SoftMaster demo, which offers high speed and hard real-time using a standard Ethernet Controller, attracted the most attention.

ISG – Industrielle Steuerungstechnik GmbH – a leading supplier of Soft CNC, Motion, and Robotics solutions, demonstrated a PC-based Pick&Place robotics application that implemeted the new Sercos SoftMaster from Bosch Rexroth on a Tenasys "Intime for Windows“ RTOS platform. Motion programming is done via PLCopen-based function blocks using the Multiprog SoftPLC programming environment. 

ke Next Magazin included the Sercos SoftMaster as part of its German-language exhibition check video. A similar English video from Tenasys is also available.

Another highlight was the Sercos-based vision system from Imago Technologies. Numerous new products were displayed; among them drives and controls from Bosch Rexroth; a Sercos slave and Ethercat master in a single device from Cannon-Automata (the new version of the S3EC Sercos/Ethercat-Bridge); the Inveor drive controller from Kostal; and an assembly that serves to control sensors and actuators on the robot arm for the exchangeable tools of packaging machines from Schubert System Elektronik. 

“With the provision of a Sercos III SoftMaster implementation as an open source, it becomes much, much easier for manufacturers to develop a Sercos III master and at the same time to participate in future improvements and expansions of the software,” says Peter Lutz, Managing Director of Sercos International. “In this way, control systems can be designed more affordably and will be simpler and more compact in the future. This is a very important criterion.”