The EtherCAT Technology Group (ETG) recently conducted member meetings in Japan and Korea where almost 200 participants received updates and results from the different ETG Working Groups.
Local ETG representatives organized the first meeting in Seoul. Many Korean ETG member companies supported the event with their presentations about EtherCAT implementation in their solutions.
For instance, Jaehwan Park from the Cultural Technology Convergence R&D Group at the Korean Institute of Industrial Technology introduced EtherCAT applications in international concert venues which contain motion control sequences for actor flying effects and thus are very demanding with regards to safety requirements.
In Japan more than 100 attendees came to the ETG Member Meeting to listen to presentations from the Japanese ETG representative as well as those offered by the ETG Regional Committee in Japan.
Kenichi Mukai from Applied Materials demonstrated why the world’s largest manufacturer of semiconductor equipment tools chose EtherCAT as their system bus.
He noted that after thorough evaluation, Applied Materials is now convinced that EtherCAT offers exactly the high performance required to support the next technological steps in wafer processing.
Applied Materials supports numerous teams within the ETG Semiconductor Technical Working Group, which has recently helped specify a set of device profiles to reduce system integration costs for the semiconductor industry.
A second highlight was the presentation given by Shinya Hirano from the notable RIKEN Institute introducing a new EtherCAT-based humanoid service robot project. It is their second generation of service robots based on EtherCAT, with the technology already having been successfully implemented in a number of previous RIKEN projects.
The ETG celebrated its 10th anniversary at the end of 2013, and the content for both ETG Member Meetings covered this special topic.
The initial presentation at both events given by Martin Rostan, Executive Director of the ETG, began with a journey through the first 10 years of the ETG. During this presentation, Rostan reflected on the many milestones of EtherCAT technology and the EtherCAT Technology Group.