The era of humanoid robots has arrived, unlocking the secrets of future intelligence

The humanoid market is expanding rapidly. EtherCAT communication has become a key driving force with its advantages of high speed, flexibility and reliability. Zhiyuan's MiniPCIe-2E EtherCAT master communication card promotes the efficient development of the humanoid robot industry with technological innovation.

Solution

With the powerful empowerment of large models, humanoid robot technology is evolving at an unprecedented speed, and its appearance, behavior patterns, levels, thinking logic and language expression ability are getting closer and closer to humans. This revolutionary technological leap not only heralds the arrival of a new era of human-computer interaction, but also lays a solid foundation for the widespread application of humanoid robots in many fields such as service, manufacturing, education, and medical care. In 2024, as the first year of mass production in the humanoid robot industry, it marks that this field has officially entered the fast lane of large-scale and commercial development. Figure 1 Humanoid Robot According to a report released by an authoritative organization, the scale of the Chinese humanoid robot market will show an explosive growth trend in the next few years, rapidly expanding from the current tens of billions of yuan to hundreds of billions of yuan, and is even expected to reach a market scale of hundreds of billions or even trillions of yuan in the more distant future. This astonishing growth rate not only reflects the strong momentum within the industry, but also demonstrates the market's high recognition and widespread expectations for humanoid robot technology.
In the highly integrated and complex technical system of humanoid robots, the importance of the communication bus as a bridge connecting various subsystems and modules is self-evident. It is not only a key channel for data transmission and command control, but also a core infrastructure to ensure the overall performance and stability of the robot. Among many communications, EtherCAT stands out with its outstanding performance advantages and becomes the preferred communication solution in the field of humanoid robots. Figure 2 Humanoid robot architecture diagram
Unique advantages of EtherCAT communication technology:

Ultra-high-speed communication and ultra-low latency: EtherCAT takes full advantage of its high-speed transmission characteristics to achieve real-time or near-real-time transmission of data points, providing robots with unparalleled data processing speed and responsiveness. This enables humanoid robots to perform more smooth and natural movements when performing complex tasks, performing precise operations, and quickly responding to environmental changes.

High flexibility and topological diversity: EtherCAT supports a variety of topological structures, including linear, tree, star, etc., providing designers with great flexibility. This flexibility allows humanoid robots to flexibly configure the network structure according to actual needs, optimize the data transmission path, and improve the overall performance of the system.

High reliability and redundant design: EtherCAT bus has high reliability and redundant design characteristics, which can quickly recover when a network failure occurs, ensuring the continuity and stability of the robot's tasks. This is especially important for application scenarios that require long-term operation and extremely high reliability requirements.

Innovative breakthrough of ZHIYUAN Electronics MiniPCIe-2E EtherCAT master communication card As a leading enterprise in the field of intelligent manufacturing and robot control, ZHIYUAN Electronics has keenly observed the development trend of the industry and launched the MiniPCIe-2E EtherCAT master communication card. This communication card inherits the technical advantages of EtherCAT bus and further achieves innovative breakthroughs in size, integration, ease of use and other aspects.

Figure 3 MiniPCIe-2EEtherCAT master communication card

• Extremely compact size and high integration: The Mini PCIe standard size design enables communication cards to be efficiently deployed in a limited space. Its highly integrated design not only optimizes space utilization, but also improves data transmission efficiency and stability.
• Excellent communication performance: Supports EtherCAT communication protocol to ensure high-speed, real-time and accurate data transmission. The microsecond control cycle provides the humanoid robot with the ultimate response speed and accuracy guarantee.
  High reliability and redundancy support: The communication card that has been strictly tested and verified can operate stably in harsh environments. At the same time, support for EtherCAT cable redundancy function further improves the system's fault tolerance and communication reliability.
• Simple and clear configuration and debugging: AWStudio (motion control version) and other supporting software tools are provided, so users can easily complete the scanning, configuration and debugging of equipment, and quickly achieve rapid deployment and efficient operation and maintenance.

The booming development of the humanoid robot industry and the core driving force of EtherCAT communication technology complement and promote each other. As one of the innovative achievements in this field, Zhiyuan Electronics will contribute important forces to promote the further development and popularization of humanoid robot technology.

Table 1 PCIe EtherCAT master communication card selection table