Just sharing this announcement with the Robots for Roboticists community. I have not had a chance to use this yet. I know I generally only share things that I have used, but I felt this was worth sharing. If you try it out, let us know how it works. Announcing Quad-SDK! A full-stack quadruped control […]
Often we need to communicate with motor controllers from different vendors. Writing software drivers for each one can be a pain and time consuming. Other times we need to use motor controllers utilizing EtherCAT or CANopen, but talking to those drives from our computers is difficult to implement. One solution is using a motion coordinator […]
What is a control system? A control system alters the future state of its system to a more desirable outcome. We often work with feedback control systems (also called closed-loop control), where the result of the command is fed back into the control system. In particular we are looking for the error between the command […]
This is just a quick post on controlling DC brushless motors with no encoders. This post applies to brushless motors that typically use hall sensors for commutation. This post does not apply to the hall-less ESC (electronic speed control) motors that typically run at very high speeds and are used for things such as quadcopters […]
Hi allPID controllers are the workhorse of the controls world. PID controllers have the goal of taking some error in your system and reducing it to 0. While there are many other control strategies out there PID is probably the most common (unless you count human control) outside of just setting a setpoint. There are […]
A Controller Area Network, or CAN for short is a common message based protocol used in cars and other vehicles. If you are trying to interface with a car/truck/bulldozer, there is a good chance that you will be reading data its CAN bus, and sending it commands via its CAN bus. It is also used […]
Hi all Here is a book review on Peter Corke’s Robotics, Vision and Control, published in 2011 (and 2013). I decided to review this book since it has a lot of Matlab code (I know I complain about Matlab later on) and examples that *could* be useful when developing real systems, testing a specific algorithm, […]
Hi all I recently wrote a post on different types of motors and feedback options, now I want to talk about how to control those motors. Each motor is often refereed to an “axis”, so a 8 axis motor controller can control up to 8 motors. There are two different components used in the control […]
