Model-Based Design of Brushless DC Motor Control and Motion Control Modelling for RoboCup SSL Robots

Abstract

Over the recent years, the RoboCup competition has grown popular and attracted more and more domestic and international universities, and the levels of the teams increase every year. In Small Size League (SSL) competition, besides a good strategy system, the precision of the robots’ actions is also of vital importance in order to achieve high performance. Thus, a highly accurate and stable motion control system is needed to drive the robots to move in accordance with the planned trajectory. Currently, our Botnia robots has a reasonable strategy system, but the motion control system of our robots is not reliable which limits the performance of our robots in the game. Therefore, the aim of this thesis was to find the ways to improve the motion control system of our Botnia robots. In this thesis, first the Model-Based Design method which is an efficient and cost-effective way to develop embedded systems was implemented to design the single brushless DC motor control built based on Arduino Mega 2560 and Altera DE2. Then, the whole model of the motion control system was built to simulate the motion control process and used to discuss the performance. The testing results were analysed and the future improvements suggested. According to the testing results, the single BLDC motor control works well, so it can be further transplanted and implemented on the robots hardware which has the similar structure - ARM Cortex-M3 + Cyclone III FPGA. And according to the simulation results, the performance of the whole motion control system will benefit a lot if an accelerometer and a gyroscope are introduced to complete the overall speed control loop in the future.