Design of Controller for Brushless Direct Current Motors Using FPGA

Brushless direct current (BLDC) motors are the pillar of advanced controllers. This chapter presents a portion of the central thoughts hidden plan of FPGA based BLDC motor controller. It covers a considerable amount of ground, yet at a genuinely essential level to make central ideas clear. This chapter gives a great strategy which is useful to aid the outline and control of financially savvy, productive brushless direct current (BLDC) motors. Speed Control of BLDC motor utilizing PIC microcontrollers requires more equipment, and with the accessibility of FPGA adaptable highlights inspired to build up a financially savvy and dependable control with variable speed go. In this chapter, utilizing an algorithm which utilizes the Resolver signals caught from the motor is created with the assistance of Resolver to Digital converters. The VHDL program produces the terminating beats required to drive the MOSFETs of three stage completely controlled scaffold converter driven by drivers. The provided outline procedure is observed to be great and proficient

A Neuro-Inspired Spike-Based PID Motor Controller for Multi-Motor Robots with Low Cost FPGAs

In this paper we present a neuro-inspired spike-based close-loop controller written in VHDL and implemented for FPGAs. This controller has been focused on controlling a DC motor speed, but only using spikes for information representation, processing and DC motor driving. It could be applied to other motors with proper driver adaptation. This controller architecture represents one of the latest layers in a Spiking Neural Network (SNN), which implements a bridge between robotics actuators and spike-based processing layers and sensors. The presented control system fuses actuation and sensors information as spikes streams, processing these spikes in hard real-time, implementing a massively parallel information processing system, through specialized spike-based circuits. This spike-based close-loop controller has been implemented into an AER platform, designed in our labs, that allows direct control of DC motors: the AER-Robot. Experimental results evidence the viability of the implementation of spike-based controllers, and hardware synthesis denotes low hardware requirements that allow replicating this controller in a high number of parallel controllers working together to allow a real-time robot control

Closed-loop motor control using high-speed fiber optics

A closed-loop control system for controlling the operation of one or more servo motors or other controllable devices is described. The system employs a fiber optics link immune to electromagnetic interference, for transmission of control signals from a controller or controllers at a remote station to the power electronics located in proximity to the motors or other devices at the local station. At the remote station the electrical control signals are time-multiplexed, converted to a formatted serial bit stream, and converted to light signals for transmission over a single fiber of the fiber optics link. At the local station, the received optical signals are reconstructed as electrical control signals for the controlled motors or other devices. At the local station, an encoder sensor linked to the driven device generates encoded feedback signals which provide information as to a condition of the controlled device. The encoded signals are placed in a formatted serial bit stream, multiplexed, and transmitted as optical signals over a second fiber of the fiber optic link which closes the control loop of the closed-loop motor controller. The encoded optical signals received at the remote station are demultiplexed, reconstructed and coupled to the controller(s) as electrical feedback signals

Thruster Communication for Subsurface Environments; Turning Waste Noise into Useful Data

Acoustic communication serves as one of the primary means of wirelessly communicating underwater. Whereas much of the developments in the field of wireless communication have focused on radio frequency technology, water highly absorbs radio waves rendering the link not feasible for most all subsurface operations. While acoustic links have enabled new capabilities for systems operating in this challenging environment, it has yet to reach the commodity availability of radio systems, meaning that an entire class of small, low-cost systems have been unable to make use of these links. The systems in question are primarily autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), as they typically operate untethered as compared to remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). To address this gap in capability, a prototype system was constructed leveraging the ambient noise produced by brushless electric thrusters to transmit data. This research aims to build on this work and answer some key questions about the technology. The primary research question is how the operation of a thruster as a propulsor impacts the transmission of data. A characterization of the system will be presented, isolating the behavior of the thruster. From this, it will be shown that a thruster behaves in a manner nearly identically to a purpose-built transducer solution. From this finding, an analysis into the optimization of the link is presented, analyzing protocol improvements, inter symbol interference, and approaches to leveraging signal harmonics of the data link to increase bandwidth. From this work, a transmitter implementation was demonstrated utilizing frequency shift keying to send data at a rate of 2000 bits per second. Beyond the specifics of this work, this transmission system was demonstrated on a low-cost, open-source motor controller, enabling a system to easy integrate or enable this capability. This demonstrates that most any system can leverage this technology to add additional operational capability

Design and Demonstration of a Two-Dimentional Test Bed for UAV Controller Evaluation

A three degree-of-freedom (DOF) planar test bed for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) controller evaluation was built. The test-bed consists of an instrumented tether and an experimental twin-rotor, planar UAV mounted with a one DOF manipulator mounted below the UAV body. The tether was constructed to constrain the UAV under test to motion on the surface of a sphere. Experiments can be conducted through the tether, approximating motion in a vertical plane by a UAV under test. The tether provides the means to measure the position and attitude of the UAV under test. The experimental twin-rotor UAV and one-link on-board manipulator, were designed and built to explore a unified control strategy for Manipulator on VTOL Aircraft (MOVA), in which the interaction of UAV body dynamics with the manipulator motion is of primary interest. The dynamics of the propulsion unit was characterized through experiments, based on which a phase lead compensator was designed to improve the UAV frequency response. A \u27separate\u27 controller based on independent nonlinear control of the VTOL aircraft and PD linear control of the on-board manipulator was designed as a reference for comparison to the unified MOVA controller. Tests with the separate controller show the negative effect that a coupled manipulator can have on the UAV body motion, while the tests on MOVA show the potential benefit of explicit compensation of the UAV and manipulator interaction

Volumetric Display Research

The goal of this project was to research and develop a volumetric display system that allows a three-dimensional CAD file to be displayed in real space. The system used a Xilinx Zynq SoC to process a CAD model into a series of two-dimensional images to be projected onto a spinning helicoid surface using DLP technology. The SoC contained a combination of custom logic on FPGA fabric as well as software on an embedded processor to implement the unique system functionality

Aerial Drone Control Networks

The goal of this project is to create an easy-to-expand Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) platform capable of conducting coordinated wide-area reconnaissance. Our system uses a combination of off-the-shelf components and open-source software to enable custom mission creation. Each drone packages and sends image, position, and orientation data over a WiFi connection to a centralized ground station computer for processing. Potential applications for this system range from search-and-rescue to surveying and inspection