Innovation of EtherCAT adaptive synchronization control in embedded CNC

EtherCAT is a real-time Ethernet protocol and has been widely used in the field of motion control owing to its high speed (100 or 1000 Mbps), low processor occupancy, and good synchronization performance in slaves. However, the master–slave synchronization method is blank in the EtherCAT protocol. The study proposes a novel master–slave synchronization method that relies on the stable sync0 of reference slave by adjusting the trigger moment of master interpolation period to settle packet loss caused by EtherCAT master–slave un-synchronization, adaptively and dynamically. Furthermore, the proposed method improved EtherCAT to a whole new level, indicating that the EtherCAT master no longer depended on the real-time operating system (RTOS). In addition, a synchronization predictive compensation mechanism was adopted to eliminate the compensation lag defect of existing synchronization methods. Compared with conventional studies, the synchronization method improved compensation efficiency, settled inaccurate compensation with evaluation derived from different working frequencies, and eliminated accumulative error in clock. Finally, the proposed method added almost no computation and communication load and only required eight or 16 bytes to modify the EtherCAT frame coding in the interpolation period. Experiments were carried out on machine tools to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method in improving the synchronization performance, with an average communication jitter of only 32–71 ns.