HRIM model of linear actuators?

[peterpolidoro]

I am curious how to best use HRIM for something like multiple axis linear actuators. For example, three linear actuators may be stacked on top of each other to construct an XYZ stage. Each linear actuator may be driven in a variety of ways, perhaps by a stepper motor, or a servo motor with an encoder, or a linear motor with an encoder. There may be two limit switches and a home switch for every axis. Each axis may be driven in either position mode, accelerating and decelerating to a target position, or in a velocity mode, where it just accelerates to a target velocity until it receives a new command. Target positions may be absolute with respect to the home switch or relative with respect to the current position. The number of axes might be variable. Would you consider a linear actuator a composite device or a basic actuator type or is that an example of an electric motor actuator? Is there a way to translate units to account for gearboxes or rotary to linear mechanisms or microstep counts?

[peterpolidoro]

Some small changes to the electricmotor actuator might make it work well with linear actuators and stepper motors. Would you prefer to make electricmotor more general to handle these cases or would you prefer to just create new actuator types? For example, if some of the units could be property values rather than fixed so a goal position could be integer millimeters, say, rather than integer radians. I do not know what any effects changes like those may cause to the way you are using the data models.