Standards play an essential role in manufacturing and technology, as evinced by the number of organizations dedicated to creating and maintaining such documents. Indeed, the development of standards is one of the hallmarks of a maturing technology. It makes sense, then, that standards have an increasingly large role to play in the application of motion control.
Motion control is an enabling technology across a variety of industries. As a result, the standards applied to it tend to be those created around specific functions like controls and networking, or around industries and applications like pharmaceutical processing or packaging. Examples of the first type include the International Engineering Consortium's (IEC's) 61131 controls standard or the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) B11 TR-3 safety risk-assessment standard. Examples of the second type include packaging standards from the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute (PMMI) or the Organization for Machine Control and Automation (OMAC).
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