Motion Systems Enter a New Era as AI and Software Transform Design

Precision plus reliability equals success, right?

For decades, that mantra held sway as a simple formula for guiding design rooms and production floors. But lately, that equation is being rebalanced as the pressure mounts to deploy new technologies at production scale while hitting old-school targets for uptime.

Under these conditions, expectations for component suppliers are shifting fast. Makers of motors, drives, sensors, actuators and controllers find themselves playing a different role. They aren’t just shipping components, but delivering integrated, multi-axis motion platforms ready to drop straight into advanced machines.

In turn, that evolution is recasting the way OEMs approach motion solutions across the machine-design lifecycle. Traditional motion control has always been about command and coordination, ensuring every movement happens as and where it should. Motion systems take that concept further by combining pre-engineered multi-axis subsystems into unified building blocks.  

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Often designed as plug-in units, motion systems streamline engineering efforts by packing the mechanics, actuators, feedback devices and often cable management systems into one package. The result is higher precision and cleaner automation overall.

One company embodying this evolution is Bell-Everman. “Motion systems for us are usually a conglomeration of our standard single-axis products put into multi-axis subsystems that become a drop-in to a larger system for an OEM or an integrator,” says Michael Everman, principal and chief technology officer, Bell-Everman, in Goleta, Calif., a designer and manufacturer of linear and rotary stages, actuators and custom electromechanical subassemblies. 

Closing the Control-Mechanics Divide

The gap between advanced mechanical design and the sophistication of motion control has only widened over the past decade, says Everman, whose team operates on the general automation, rather than the rarefied world of semiconductor steppers and lithography stages, where every control loop is custom-tuned to the dynamics of a single machine. 

To clarify the distinction, Everman draws a clear line with terminology. Anything moving from point A to point B is technically an actuator. The leap from actuator to stage comes down to much higher fidelity, he said. Actuators deliver a blunt, force‑driven motion, while stages achieve precise, repeatable movement.

That difference, he said, shapes where Bell‑Everman places its efforts, prioritizing multi‑axis mechanical motion systems for packaging, biomedical, aerospace applications, over the bespoke control design that govern high‑end fab equipment.

Smarter Controls, Simpler Mechanics

Everman notes that even as the mechanical side becomes more straightforward, the control side is getting markedly smarter. Software‑centric architectures, high-speed protocols such as EtherCAT and daisy‑chained networks allow engineers to coordinate many axes while reducing cabling, he says.

 In his view, “smart” motors often offer more capability than an application typically needs, yet the core requirement remains that the motor performs a simple move, reliably and repetitively. The net effect is that engineers can build surprisingly complex machines from straightforward, modular building blocks that are akin to updated cam‑driven mechanisms.

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Still, for all the configurability, Bell-Everman machines are still purpose-built workhorses. “I would say 80% of the time, we’re making a machine that’s going to do one thing and one thing only, and the customer wants to do it for 10 years,” Everman said.

This balance between increasingly intelligent controls and highly specialized mechanical design is echoed across the industry, where application-specific performance requirements can vary wildly.

Industries Redefining Motion Limits

Performance ceilings aren’t standing still. Few environments illustrate this more clearly than food-processing lines, which impose some of the harshest constraints on motion-system design. Equipment cannot have crevices that trap residue and it must withstand constant washdowns.

Given these conditions, it is little surprise engineers default to pneumatics for many food-handling tasks. Pneumatic devices are sealed by design, can be built entirely in stainless steel, making them well-suited for corrosive clean-in-place regimes. 

On the opposite side of the spectrum, says Everman, lies metrology platforms and semiconductor fabs, where analog front-ends, ultra-tight servo loops and nanometer-level precision catapult motion systems into specialized territory. But even in more mundane mainstream automation, adds Everman, higher‑fidelity servo loops are becoming the default. 

Then there are the outliers: UAVs, autonomous vehicles and other cyber-physical systems. Here, mechanical motion is a relatively standard issue. The complexity lies in system-level orchestration. Collision avoidance, swarm coordination and AI trajectory planning introduce different constraints. “It’s a much bigger problem getting them all to work together,” Everman notes.

The Rise of Drop-In Motion Platforms

Against that backdrop, OEMs are changing how they source motion components. Instead of burning engineering hours assembling stacks of discrete components, more teams are integrating subsystems as the default unit of design.

“They don’t want to dedicate an engineer to put two axes together if they can have Bell-Everman put together two axes for them,” Everman says. That model now represents a majority of the work, with Bell-Everman supplying the complete mechanical stack—often up to the motor and sometimes the amplifier—while the customer handles only the higher-level controls. 

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This model also reinforces the company’s “land-and-expand” strategy. A customer may start with a single axis, then ask the company to provide the surrounding axes and mechanical elements.

OEMs prefer writing fewer purchase orders and value having a larger portion of the system warrantied by a single supplier. For Everman’s customers, the advantage is palpable: having a single provider reduces engineering burden and minimizes operational risk.

Pushing Intelligence Downstream into the Motion Stack

Everman notes that the next major inflection point in motion technology will come from artificial intelligence moving deeper into the system’s smallest nodes. Just as 3D printing upended the way engineers think about geometry years ago, AI is already infiltrating day-to-day engineering workflows and taking on the cognitive grunt work—taking on the mental heavy lifting by solving equations, drafting designs and crunching the complex tradeoffs. 

Project that trend forward, and AI models begin to scale down to microcontrollers and other low-power devices that operate independently from larger data networks. At that level, Everman argues, AI would enable even “dumb” machines to make basic decisions on their own by, for example, determining whether a move is safe, whether an object is what it appears to be or whether a line should stop.

Instead of relying on a single, centralized processor, Everman said, intelligence becomes widely distributed, enabling decisions to be made at the same granularity as the motion itself.

The shift signifies a paradigm in which autonomy is being built from the bottom up, as companies build on their historical expertise and design systems in which individual components contribute directly to decision-making.