Industrial robots are highly dynamic. They move in multiple axes through potentially millions of cycles. 

Often the robot control bus is routed through the inner workings of the robot and its joints.  This results in data running close to noise sources such as motors and power cables and through highly mobile joints.

The cables must be robust enough to deal with the mechanical stresses, but also flexible enough to allow the  bending, twisting, and sliding of the robotic system.

Plastic Optical Fiber (POF) is a type of fiber that uses a large 1mm polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) as the core material that, along with Firecomms' innovative tranceivers provide:

Firecomms offers a number of transceiver devices suitable for robotic & cobotic applications.

DC-1/5/10/50 MBd low speed, serial protocols for command-and-control applications

125 Mbps, 250 Mbps and Gigabit for higher speed data applications.

Transceivers are available in industry standard plug type connectors as well as simple bare fiber plugless terminations. All Firecomms transceivers are EMI hardened and designed to be used and installed in harsh industrial environments.

For Ethernet applications, high-flex shielded copper cable can be used, but it is expensive, large and must be shielded. 

Customers have tested standard 2.2 mm POF for torsional reliability and surpassed 25 million cycles without

measurable degradation in performance. Copper options failed in less than half that time. For example, high flex

CAT5 cable is often only rated to 1 to 2 million torsion cycles at 180^o per meter.

Related Documents

Robotics Solutions Guide

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