Flexible and reconfigurable manufacturing systems aim to enable more versatile, connected, and intelligent operations not only from a system-level perspective, but also from a field-level perspective. This paper focuses on field-level applications for peripheral intelligence and proposes a concept and architecture for an Active Device Driver (ADD) that can be actively adjusted to unforeseen situations versus repeating fixed task procedures. This new device driver is designed to permit easy and rapid transformability to systems by enabling device modulization and abstraction, control and configuration under service-oriented architecture, actively supporting control reliability, and producing well-organized manufacturing data. These features can be achieved by implementing the control I/O encapsulating module, device information model, OPC-UA server interface, and peripheral control module. Two case studies with robot grippers are conducted to validate the working principle of ADDs.