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Home / Why do plastics manufacturers prefer a servo-driven 3-axis robot?

Why do plastics manufacturers prefer a servo-driven 3-axis robot?

2025/05/19 By Topstar

Unlike pneumatic or hydraulic robots, susceptible to compressibility, heat, and operating noise, servo-driven 3-axis robot provide clean, quiet, and highly repeatable motion with tight and precise speed control. This level of precision makes it easy to handle precision-molded parts, reduce scrap, and increase overall production. In addition, servo drives support complex motion trajectories. In high-speed injection molding, servo drives can improve product quality and simplify workflow integration, enabling plastic product manufacturers to consistently complete insert embedding and post-molding pick-up, tray placement, and boxing.

Precise control with servo-driven 3-axis robot

Precision and repeatability are the core of injection molding robots. Controlled by high-resolution encoders and closed-loop feedback, servo drives provide consistent positioning in every cycle, ensuring that every part is treated the same. This repeatability can directly translate into uniform part quality, reduced rework, and minimized inspection costs. Servo drives can maintain a path accuracy of ±0.05 mm even at high speeds. This precision is critical for micro-molding applications, thin-wall packaging components, and medical device housings. In addition, this precision control facilitates seamless integration with vision systems and force sensors for adaptive pick-and-place and in-line quality verification, allowing plastic producers to benefit from fewer defective parts and higher yields due to reduced scrap.

3-axis robot’s five-in-one servo drive architecture

The highlight of the Topstar servo-driven 3-axis robot is the “five-in-one servo drive” architecture, which integrates the control of five servo motors into a compact drive unit. By integrating multiple axes into one powerful drive, the three-axis robot achieves truly synchronous multi-axis motion without delay, enabling precise coordination of auxiliary tasks such as mold opening, part extraction, and transfer. Plastic product manufacturers will benefit from smaller production space, simpler power wiring, and less spare parts management. The integrated drive communicates via a high-speed fieldbus, providing real-time current, speed, and position diagnostics for all five channels, enabling predictive maintenance and rapid troubleshooting. This integration also minimizes electromagnetic interference and simplifies the integration of the entire injection molding system, allowing engineers to deploy advanced motion trajectories and safety interlocks with fewer components. This enables plastics manufacturers to achieve higher system reliability and lower total cost of ownership.

3 axis robot 1-1

Multi-axis control by CPU chip allocation

The unique feature of the “Five-in-One Servo Drive” architecture is the unique CPU architecture that manages five independent servo axes using only three high-performance chips. Each CPU controls two axes, combining computational efficiency with powerful real-time processing capabilities. The third central processor monitors master coordination, safety protocols, and human-machine interface tasks. This streamlined control topology reduces inter-axis latency, achieving smoother acceleration curves and more accurate contour tracking capabilities in delicate demolding operations. In addition, by distributing processing tasks to multiple CPUs, the 3-axis robot can maintain high throughput even under high loads and complex motion sequences.

At the same time, this compact CPU layout simplifies firmware updates, allows deployment to all axes, and speeds up diagnostic procedures, allowing maintenance personnel to pinpoint abnormal conditions in specific axes quickly. And under the integrated control system, hardware costs are reduced, cooling requirements within the drive housing are reduced, and long-term reliability is improved, enabling complex multi-axis coordination with minimal infrastructure.

High power output and stable torque output

To meet the dynamic needs of injection molding, fast part extraction, transfer to overcome cyclic inertia, and precise deposition. Topstar’s servo-driven 3-axis robot is rated for up to 750 W of continuous torque per axis and higher peak torque. Such a powerful rated power ensures that the 3-axis robot maintains consistent torque under different payloads, completing the grasping of lightweight micro-molded connectors to larger housings and components. In addition, high power density also means faster cycle times, enabling 3-axis robots to accelerate and decelerate quickly without sacrificing position accuracy or generating mechanical clearance. The transmission system uses low-inertia servo motors and precision planetary gearboxes. It uses a rack and pinion meshing transmission before and after, which has high stiffness and can respond immediately to motion commands. As a result, plastic product manufacturers can confidently increase productivity, optimize mold cycle sequences, and reduce reliance on secondary manual operations.

Improve the overall energy efficiency of 3-axis robot

Topstar’s servo-driven 3-axis robot adopts a multi-axis common DC bus architecture, which can achieve up to 20% energy savings. When one axis decelerates, its regenerative energy is fed back to the shared DC bus and immediately provided to other axes that need to accelerate, reducing the total power consumption of the facility grid. This regenerative braking function reduces operating energy costs and the heat generated inside the drive electronics, extends the life of the robot, and reduces the load brought by production, thus realizing a more energy-efficient injection molding robot. In addition, the integrated bus design simplifies power distribution, reduces wiring complexity, and allows users to easily expand it to other axes or peripheral auxiliary equipment.

Plastic Molding Machine 80-1

Servo automatic shutdown, reducing standby power consumption

To further optimize efficiency, the servo-driven 3-axis robot is equipped with a servo automatic shutdown function, which automatically cuts off the power supply to the servo motor during long periods of idleness without manual intervention. In standby mode, the servo drive senses that the motor has stopped running and automatically cuts off the power supply to the motor, eliminating the load. This feature alone can save up to 10% of electricity in a typical production shift, especially when operators frequently shut down equipment in a high-variety injection molding production environment. The extremely low delay in restarting the servo motor ensures the 3-axis robot can resume high-speed operation almost immediately, thereby maintaining fast cycle response capabilities.

Faster response time and energy saving

3-axis robots in injection molding under servo drive can combine precision, repeatability, and power with advanced control and energy savings. Under the Topstar 5-in-1 servo drive, 750 W power per axis, common bus energy recovery, and servo automatic shutdown function can greatly shorten cycle time, reduce scrap, reduce energy consumption, and improve production flexibility.

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