Coordinated motion between piezo stages and servo axes

Aerotech’s Ensemble QLe panel-mount nanopositioning piezo drive is designed for use with the Ensemble family of drives and controllers. The QLe is claimed to connect to any Ensemble controller network enabling coordinated motion between piezo stages and servo axes at higher rates than other controller or drive products. It is suited for applications ranging from demanding scientific research to advanced OEM machine systems.

Featuring a dual-core 456 MHz, double-precision, floating-point DSP, the QLe drives are said to provide extreme processing power over applications including point-to-point motion, linear and circular interpolation, multi-axis error correction, and autofocusing. The QLe also offers high-speed position latching capability and multi-axis position synchronised output for generation of pulses based on actual position feedback in applications ranging from laser firing to data acquisition system triggering.

The QLe is claimed to enable sub-nanometer positioning resolution at high bandwidth, with a linearity said to be better than 0.01% over the full travel range in closed-loop mode.

Ensemble software uses advanced PID servo loops with feedforward and multiple integrators coupled with eight programmable filters to supply the user with the tools needed to optimise motion performance.