Elmo Unveils High-Power Servo Drives and Motion Controller for Rugged Applications

Israel-based Elmo has announced the release of new motion controllers and servo drives designed to operate in industrial and extreme environments, including high altitudes and sea depths. The launch introduces the Titanium line and expands the Platinum line, setting new benchmarks for power density and multi-axis compactness in the robotics sector. These components integrate functional safety directly into the hardware, enabling the development of smaller, safer, and more intelligent automated systems such as AGVs and cobots.

The newly introduced Titanium line features the Castanet and Harmonica servo drives along with the Maestro motion controller, all designed to streamline complex robotic architectures. The Titanium Castanet provides dual-axis capabilities in a matchbox-sized footprint, allowing it to replace two older Elmo Twitter drives while reducing the physical implementation size by nearly half. The Titanium Harmonica offers power density up to 50A/100V, while the Maestro controller supports up to 256 axes, managing 16 axes at an Ethercat speed of 100uSec. These drives utilize Gallium Nitride (GaN) technology to improve switching efficiency and performance for next-generation motor systems.

Elmo has also expanded its Platinum line with the Jori and Cymbal servo drives, which are built for high-power and rugged applications. The Platinum Jori 30A/60A drives deliver up to 40 kW of continuous power and introduce Silicon Carbide (SiC) power stage technology to the compact package. The Platinum Cymbal drive provides up to 17kW of power within a ruggedized, compact footprint. Both models incorporate functional safety features, which Elmo reports can significantly reduce the need for external safety hardware and complex cabling in automated environments.

According to Elizabeth Victor, Director of Sales for Elmo US, the integration of functional safety at the drive level allows OEMs to build safety features into the foundation of their motion subsystems, which can eliminate the need for traditional safety cages. These advancements are specifically targeted at robotic systems like autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), cobots, and exoskeletons that require synchronized motion across a variety of motor sizes. By enabling engineers to synchronize multi-axis positioning with a single bus rather than multiple buses, these new drives facilitate the creation of more efficient and sophisticated robotic hands and mobile platforms.