Brushless Motor Control

Question

I'm trying to design the motor control system for an autonomous quad-rotor. We're building it from scratch, against my personal desire to use an existing platform like the pelican, and we're using brushless motors to power the propellers. My group just purchased the Mystery 12A Brushless Speed Controller (Blue Series), and I'm trying to figure out how to get ROS to talk to it. I really have no idea how to do this. The tutorials do not mention anything about how to control motors. Will I have to write my own system? Is there a package that can already do this?

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Originally posted by ww3ace on ROS Answers with karma: 15 on 2011-11-18

Post score: 1

Answer 1

You'll generally want to have microcontroller doing this very low level control and interfacing stuff with hard realtime constraints. If you look at basically any quadrotor you'll notice that they all have a microcontroller for interfacing the motor controllers, IMU, ultrasonic sensors, barometer etc. (and most have the basic attitude stabilization loop running at 100-1000Hz running there too). Even if you'd have the attitude estimation and control running on a PC board, you'd still need a microntoller for interfacing everything. Note that ROS in it's basic form does not satisfy hard real-time constraints (there is the OROCOS integration and a realtime_tools package that could be used for that though).

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Originally posted by Stefan Kohlbrecher with karma: 24361 on 2011-11-18

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 3