Elmo Motion Control

Small drives for demanding axes

Elmo Motion Control is an Israeli maker of servo drives, motion controllers and integrated motors. According to the company's website it now belongs to the Bosch group, serves more than 2,500 OEMs and has more than 4.5 million drives deployed. The company lists these industries: semiconductors, robotics, life sciences, packaging, industrial automation, laser, AGVs and smart warehouses, defense and extreme environments. Elmo does not make robots.

Drive families

The range is split into four families, offered in versions for industrial and harsh environments: Titanium (the newest), Platinum, Gold and SimplIQ. Best known in robotics are Gold and Platinum — compact yet powerful drives, valued where electronics must fit inside an arm or a joint housing. The manufacturer states EtherCAT and CANopen communication and multi-axis control of up to 256 axes from a single network. Composer and Application Studio (EAS III) software is used for configuration.

A frank note: the materials we collected contain no Elmo datasheets, so we give no currents, voltages or dimensions for specific models. We know the families and interfaces from the official website, and concrete parameters must be taken from the manufacturer's documentation, as explained in “How to Read a Robot Datasheet”.

Role in a robot

A servo drive turns a motion command into current for the motor and closes the current, velocity and position loops. In an industrial arm or a cobots model, power density relative to size matters, because every gram of electronics in a joint has to be lifted. The same principle applies to the drives described in “Actuators in Humanoid Robots”: the controller is part of what we call an actuator. In mobile robots platforms and AGVs, Elmo electronics suits wheel and lift drives. Cheaper low-power options are, for example, ODrive Robotics or mjbots, and in the higher range Kollmorgen and Advanced Motion Controls compete.

Elmo in Poland and Europe

Here we have a concrete lead. According to the distributor's own information, the Warsaw company Ultra Robotics, active since 2007, is an official distributor of Elmo drives and of Harmonic Drive gearboxes. For an integrator in Poland that is a convenient pairing: controller and gearbox from one source, with Polish support. Before relying on it, verify the current distribution agreement at the source, because such arrangements change quickly.

For a robot's cost, Elmo drives are a smaller item than actuators or gearboxes, but not negligible — with many axes, drive electronics can exceed the cost of the motor itself, especially in special-purpose robots built in small series. For the overall calculation see “Humanoid Robot TCO: How to Calculate Total Cost”. The settings where such drives are most often found are factories, warehouses and laboratories. For local integrators and machine builders, an overview of companies is in “Polish Robotics Companies”.