UNISP

Use of Pulse Width Modulation for Robot Motor Control

 

Modeste Kenne M.

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Iowa State University, USA

 

 

The Digilent Motor Robot Kit (MRK) provides the perfect starting point for robotics and has the power to be used for advanced designs and applications. Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) was a key idea used in this project to control motors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A duty cycle was used to specify how long the motor was on during a given period of time by applying pulses to a dual H-Bridge. This was done using the C programming language within the MPLAB programming environment.

Likewise, analog systems such as linear power supplies, tend to generate a lot of heat since they are basically variable resistors carrying a lot of current. However, digital systems don’t generally generate as much heat. Almost all the heat generated by a switching device is during the transition, while the device is neither on nor off, but in between. This is because power follows the following formula: P = V I.  If either voltage or current is near zero, then power will be near zero. Therefore, PWM takes full advantage of this fact.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The main takeaway is that the correlation between this project and the results are quite amazing. Also, expanding the robot’s capabilities allows to pursue a wide range of programming fields ranging from entertainment to bioinformatics, which are very helpful nowadays and would be useful for future researches.