Welcome to Oriental Motor's "Engineering Notes" Blog:

STO, or "Safe Torque Off", is a dedicated, built-in safety circuit function that makes safety easier to manage for motion devices, such as an industrial robot.  It is part of the overall safety system designed to prevent injuries or damage.

For automated factories, motor failures mean lost production and lost revenue.  Being able to identify the specific issue in advance and its location is critical to maintaining production efficiency.  To be successful, extra sensors must be added to detect abnormalities.  There may be an easier way.

Oriental Motor offers many pre-assembled geared motors for quality, consistency, and reliability.   In addition, gearheads from our industry partners increase the torque range of our motors further to accommodate more applications.  Here are some advantages of geared motors.

For someone who has never had experience wiring I/O for motion control, it can be scary the first time.  If devices are not wired correctly, it can cause a range of issues from a motor simply not doing what's expected to irreversible product damage.  I still get that nervous feeling before I press the START button on a demo.  Murphy's Law, anyone?

The significance of position control accuracy of motors varies depending on the application.  For an AGV in a farm with DC motor-driven wheels, position control accuracy is probably not as crucial as a surgical robot where incisions are controlled by servo motors or stepper motors.

A gripper is typically an end effector that is installed at the end of a robotic arm or on a cartesian robot and can be used to grip parts in order to transfer them from one location to another.  However, there's more to it than just closing the jaws to pinch a part.  

Now that we understand the calculations behind load torque and load inertia, we're a little closer to motor selection.  You might be wondering why I separated load torque and acceleration torque calculations.  That's because in order to calculate for acceleration torque, load inertia and speed must be calculated first. 

Other than torque or speed, another factor should be considered when sizing motors.  

Proper sizing of a motor requires that 3 criteria must be met: torque, load inertia, and speed.  For the first part of this Motor Sizing Basics series, I will be explaining what load torque is, how to calculate it for specific application examples, and how it fits into the torque requirement for the application.