Software & Middleware

EtherCAT

EtherCAT is a real-time industrial Ethernet fieldbus, introduced by Beckhoff in 2003 and standardized in IEC 61158, in which slave devices process frames on the fly as they pass through a daisy-chained ring. This yields microsecond-level cycle times and sub-microsecond synchronization via distributed clocks across hundreds of nodes. It is a dominant bus for coordinating servo drives, encoders, and I/O in robots, including many humanoid and quadruped platforms.

Why it matters for physical AI

Kilohertz whole-body control across dozens of joints requires deterministic, synchronized communication that standard networking cannot provide, making buses like EtherCAT the invisible backbone of dynamic robot hardware.