Motor Control

Motor Control

The motors are controlled with a PWM signal which will come from our PCB. The Pic32 on our board will receive instructions from the Raspberry Pi and then send the appropriate signal to the motors. While the rovers are on their paths looking for the objects of interest, they will maintain a fixed speed which will be set and monitored by the PIC32 to ensure the motor is travelling at the desired speed.

Motors:

Our bots will use servo motors for the drive train. The servo motors are 360 degree continuous rotation servo motors with encoders included in the servo package. The information from the encoders breaks out from a single wire on the unit and is sent to a GPIO pin on the PIC32 custom board. The encoder information can be used to verify the performance of the motors and the distance traveled. The motors are controlled with a simple PWM signal that will be sent from the PIC32. The velocity of the servo motors can be varied and controlled with the PWM signal. The servo motors will receive power directly from the 7.4V LiPo battery. The servo motors do not need clocks.