by Gary Mintchell | Nov 21, 2016 | Automation, Motion Control
This post regarding magnetic encoders is not my typical news. I met with the company at Automation Fair a couple of weeks ago. It’s the newest thing I’ve heard in encoders in a while. Thought I’d pass it along for all you servo engineers and business development managers out there.
POSITAL’s new family of kit encoders provide the manufacturers of servomotors and other machinery with rugged, accurate and cost-efficient tools for building rotary position measurements into their products. The new kit encoders are based on POSITAL’s self-contained magnetic rotary encoders. Now however, the core components of these instruments are available as separate assemblies that can be readily integrated into other products.
The POSITAL kit encoder components offer a number of advantages over the rotation measuring devices that have traditionally been used with servomotors and rotating equipment. Compared to resolvers, they are more accurate and offer multi-turn measurement capabilities. They also provide digital outputs instead of the analog signals produced by resolvers. While POSITAL’s magnetic encoder technology provides slightly less precision than the best optical disk encoders, it is less costly, less vulnerable to contamination from oil or dust and more resistant to shock and vibration. POSITAL encoders also provide an all-electronic multi-turn absolute position measuring capability that evaluates the full absolute angular position, including the total number of shaft rotations. The rotation counter is powered by the company’s well-proven Wiegand-effect energy harvesting technology so that rotation counts are always accurate, even if the rotations occur when external power is unavailable. This system eliminates the need for backup batteries or for the geared optical disks used in some products.
POSITAL magnetic kit encoders are easy to incorporate into normal manufacturing processes since they don’t require extra-precision, near-cleanroom assembly conditions. A built-in self-calibration capability can compensate for small sensor-to-shaft alignment errors. The electronic components, including Hall-effect sensors, a 32-bit microprocessor and the Wiegand-wire energy harvesting system, are packaged in a convenient 36 mm diameter, 24.2mm deep unit. For servomotors with magnetic brakes, a special magnetic shield has been developed to isolate the magnetic pickups of the measurement system from the external magnetic fields.
The resolution of the new POSITAL kit encoders is 17 bit, with an accuracy of better than + 0.1°. The operating temperature range is -40 to +105 °C. These devices are available with a variety of non-proprietary communications protocols, including BISS, SSI and RS485-based protocols.
POSITAL is a supplier of advanced industrial position sensors used in a wide variety of motion control and safety systems. The company is also an innovator in product design and manufacturing processes and a pioneer of Industry 4.0 (Industrial Internet of Things/IIoT), offering customers the benefits of built-to-order products combined with the price advantages of mass-production. POSITAL is a member of the international FRABA group, whose history dates back to 1918, when its predecessor, Franz Baumgartner elektrische Apparate GmbH, was established in Cologne, Germany to manufacture relays. Since then, the company has played a trendsetting role in the development of rotary encoders, inclinometers and other sensor products. POSITAL has a global reach with subsidiaries in Europe, North America and Asia – and sales and distribution partners around the world.
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 16, 2016 | Automation, Safety
This is another of a series of posts from the Rockwell Automation show Automation Fair last week. This stop on the tour concerned Safe Machines. The safety team has been active for many years now developing new products and initiatives. Not everything they do is expressly pointed at selling a product. Often they are out in public teaching safe machine practices, risk assessment, and safe machine design.
They showed a BevCorp machine that had been designed with the latest safety advances in mind. The idea involved removing incentives to defeating safeties. One feature is an ultra-wide door that allows access to more of the machine.
The safety system has a “request to enter” function. This is a high inertia filler machine. Activating the function begins with guiding the machine to a slow stop at a repeatable location. Therefore the controls always know status without requiring a reboot. Of course, there is a safe reduced speed mode to allow maintenance without a shutdown.
Integral with the Connected Enterprise philosophy of Rockwell Automation, the HMI and software collects data on who/what stopped the machine, which safety devices were triggered, and the like. From this data, employee behavior can be ascertained.
This leads to the real value of Connected Enterprise–production, engineering and EH&S can come together to evaluate the entire system from all points of view. The goal is to maintain productivity through use of a safe machine.
I’ve followed Rockwell Automation safety for years. In fact, I can remember classes in the 90s before becoming an editor on risk assessment and the launch of safety products. There have been two popular podcast interviews at Automation Minutes one on Safety Automation Builder and the other on the Safety Maturity Index.
This is the last stand where I had a deep dive. Following will be a review of partners who also exhibited at the Fair. Then it will be on to the next conference–which I couldn’t visit in person, but I have some interviews.
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 15, 2016 | Automation, Security
Cyber protection takes on a number of forms. Most everything involves “defense in depth” strategies. I just talked with an Israeli company started by former security agents who has found a different vulnerability and counteracts it. This is the first of three press releases I’ve been sitting on for release today. I guess Nov. 15 is a magic day in the PR world.
APERIO Systems emerged from stealth mode, launching the industry’s first technology that detects artificial manipulations of industrial process data, enabling operators to take real-time corrective action without service disruption to industrial control systems (ICS). From the rate of gas flow at a petroleum refinery, to the temperature and spin rates of turbines in a power plant, or the chlorine level of water supply networks, APERIO Systems’ proprietary Data Forgery Protection (DFP) technology delivers the last line of defense in protecting critical SCADA systems against insider and external threats.
APERIO Systems, already deployed at several sites across EMEA, secured seed funding from a consortium of private investors, including prominent cybersecurity veterans Doron Bergerbest-Eilon, Liran Tancman, and Shlomi Boutnaru. Bergerbest-Eilon is renowned for his role in establishing the agency charged with protecting all critical infrastructure in the State of Israel and is the former director of the security and protection division of the Israel Security Agency (ISA). He is currently the founder, president and CEO of ASERO Worldwide, a security consulting firm. Tancman and Boutnaru, who played key roles in building Israel’s cybersecurity capabilities, founded predictive cybersecurity startup CyActive, which was acquired by PayPal in 2015.
“Current solutions focus on keeping hackers outside critical systems, but attacks like the one that took down the power grid in Ukraine clearly show that sophisticated attackers will eventually penetrate these systems,” said Bergerbest-Eilon. “Once attackers breach a system, they must blind the operators and protection mechanisms by falsifying data in order to inflict severe and long-lasting damage. This entirely new category of Data Forgery Protection (DFP) is the key to keeping our critical infrastructure safe from attacks.”
Industrial control systems (ICS) are generally outdated from a cybersecurity perspective, vulnerable and difficult to patch because mission critical systems cannot be taken offline. While the threat to ICS is growing, critical systems security products on the market today are intrusive, hard to maintain, costly to integrate, and often produce vague and unactionable alerts, which cannot be acted upon by critical utility control rooms.
“Think of APERIO Systems as a polygraph for process data — it detects when your system is lying to you,” said Yevgeni Nogin, CEO of APERIO Systems. “With the unrelenting tenacity of cybercriminals, critical infrastructure breaches are inevitable. By guaranteeing the authenticity and integrity of operational data, APERIO Systems ensures that operators always know what’s really going on, enabling them to react quickly to a breach and take corrective action — making the critical systems resilient to the most dangerous of attacks.”
APERIO Systems’ advanced proprietary algorithms search for the data’s unique fingerprints and validate its authenticity. Any mismatches generate an alert and APERIO Systems pinpoints the attacked equipment and forged process data. Using a sophisticated combination of physics and state-of-the-art machine learning techniques, APERIO Systems reconstructs the real values of the forged operational data and reverts it to its original state in real time — establishing unprecedented operational resilience.
How APERIO Systems Protects
Both internal and external attackers can penetrate the most critical infrastructures, causing severe and long lasting damage. In order to do so, they must hide their malicious activity and deceive plant operators by forging the reported values of critical devices — remaining undetected and preventing timely corrective action. APERIO Systems’ Data Forgery Protection technology immediately exposes forged system readings to safeguard critical control systems and allow quick and effective remediation.
- APERIO Systems provides:
Data Forgery Protection (DFP): Validates integrity and authenticity of reported signals to provide operators with true state awareness, enabling them to take corrective action in real time.
- Process Continuity: Enables trust in the most critical data and provides resilience when attacked.
- Operational Alerts: Fast, actionable, specific and accurate alerts integrate cybersecurity into operational emergency procedures, allowing operators to mitigate permanent damage.
- Accurate and Relevant: Alerts operators only when the reported process state does not reflect the plant’s real situation — providing an extremely low false alert rate.
- Minimized Risk: Passive and non-intrusive system minimizes operational risks, as well as installation and maintenance costs.
- Counters Insider Threats: Protects the plant’s process continuity from both external and internal actors.
APERIO Systems is led by a veteran executive team with roots in the elite units of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), as well as top cybersecurity and industrial companies:
- Yevgeni Nogin, CEO — a graduate of the elite “Talpiot” IDF military academy served over nine years in elite intelligence and R&D units of the IDF, and brings expertise in SCADA systems security.
- Michael Shalyt, VP Product — a graduate of the “Psagot” IDF academic program and served as leading researcher and team leader in the elite 8200 unit. Prior to joining APERIO Systems, he led the malware research team at Check Point.
- Itay Baruchi, Head of Algorithms — served as director of Industrial MRI, where he worked closely with several of the biggest oil and gas drilling companies. Before that, he founded and served as CTO of Pythagoras Solar.
- Charles Tresser, Chief Scientific Officer — a world renowned expert in dynamical systems. Tresser is one of the world’s leading experts in chaos theory and formerly Director of Research at IBM and France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 17, 2016 | Automation, Technology
The most exciting thing happening now with industrial robots is the new intimacy of human and machine–collaborative robots.
Since I had other plans and could not attend the Rockwell Automation track at the EHS Conference coming up in Pittsburgh, Rockwell brought a piece of the safety symposium to me. George Schuster, a member of the global safety team at Rockwell and a robotics safety expert, discussed the current state of the art with me.
Schuster told me that Rockwell Automation is working with Fanuc Robots to change the way people and machinery interact.
There is much interest in the work in the user community to create manufacturing processes that leverage the strengths of machines (stability, reliability, strength) and the intelligence and adaptability of humans.
“In the past we engineered to keep them separate or at least arbitrate the shared space. Now we’ve found good benefits to engineer ways for people and machines to work together,” said Schuster.
Three things are enabling this approach. First, there are the standards. ISO 10218 and ANSI/RIA 15.06-2012 give guidance for designers. They also make it clear that thorough risk assessments must be carried out when designing these processes. Next, Rockwell is blending its safety technology with robotics. Then design approaches are looking holistically at what is possible with human and machine working together. Together, this is actually more of an application space rather than just technology.
Increasingly working on removing barriers between robotics and controllers, technology includes connectivity and safety–EtherNet/IP Safe; GuardLogix system; Add-on profiles in software-pre-engineered common data structure; part of the Connected Enterprise, includes connection of devices plus communication to upper levels to collect and analyze information–all working together.
There are four key current applications: ability to stop robot without killing power to allow operator to interact for instance load/unload, can quickly enter/leave area; hand guided operation, person can move/guide robot kind of like ergonomic load assist; speed and separation monitor, sensor system detects presence and position of personnel, modulates robot, can stop if person gets too close, coordinates robot speed and approaching person; power force limiting-this one is a little tricky, it’s hard to know where the robot will come in contact and what force is acceptable to the human, difference between soft flesh and hard place, etc.
This is all cool. It is ushering in a new era of manufacturing.
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 12, 2016 | Uncategorized
We toss the term thought leader around carelessly at times. In this case, it’s true. Terry Blevins is retiring this month from Emerson Process. He is a true thought leader in process control. He taught me a lot. I’m sure that he taught scores more much more. Check out his blog post.
