Electric servo drives

Electric servo drives refer to those components of a machine that control its motor to achieve the best possible performance. Servo drives ensure that the machine ramps up to the final speed as quickly as possible, operates at this speed for as long as possible, reduces the speed as late as possible and comes to a stop on time. Servo drives are mainly used in machine and system building, in decentralised systems as well as in positioning systems (rotary, cross and multi-axis systems).

How are electric servo drives controlled?

Electric servo drives receive commands (optional: control commands) from a process control system, a PLC or from a position controller (optional: motion controller). They execute them and report on this process, its completion and any malfunctions. Should the load of the machine change, electric servo drives can regulate the power autonomously and absorb the change.

Which systems are supported?

Modern servo drives support various fieldbus systems, including Ethernet/IP, EtherCAT®, PROFINET, Modbus as well as CANopen and DeviceNet®. Older servo drives usually still have a serial interface.

Festo products

At Festo you will find electric servo drives as servo drive controllers or stepper motor controllers.

Servo drives

The servo drive product range is specially designed for our servo motors, toothed belt axes and ball screw axes or electric cylinders. They are perfect in combination with engineering software and also benefit from complete safety solutions for mechanical and drive systems. Together with our automation platform and other comprehensive motion control solutions, the servo controllers provide a virtually unlimited range of solutions for industrial automation tasks. In this, they are supported by innovative software solutions for engineering and configuration. Thanks to the variety of available fieldbuses such as Ethernet/IP, EtherCAT®, PROFINET, Modbus® as well as CANopen and DeviceNet®, the servo controllers are ideally suited to communicate directly with almost all programmable logic controllers (PLCs).

The electric, multi-protocol capable servo drive CMMT-AS is included in our Core Range as a standard servo drive, and is one of the most compact servo drives on the market. It is characterised by precise force, speed and position control. The software makes commissioning quick and easy, and the required fieldbus variant can also be set individually.

Our motor controller CMMP-AS, on the other hand, is particularly well suited to decentralised motion functions thanks to its numerous interfaces and functions. Its standardised interfaces allow easy integration into the mechatronic multi-axis modular system.

Stepper motor controllers

Our stepper motor controller product range offers a simple and cost-effective way of implementing electrical movements; it makes moving and positioning easier than ever before – and is much more cost-effective than conventional electric solutions.

When it comes to tasks with low power requirements, the electric multi-protocol-capable servo drive CMMT-ST is very efficient and has proven itself especially in positioning tasks and point-to-point motion solutions. It is 50% more compact than our smallest servo drive controller CMMT-AS and therefore perfect for use in simple applications.