Blog posts by Aaron Berk

We've now reached the point where all the separate components of the rover can come together to form something greater than the sum of its parts. The chassis is required as a physical platform for mounting our hardware such as motors and of course the EDP which holds the brains of the rover - the mbed. After this we saw the quadrature encoders give us control over the position of the wheels, and the PID controller allowed us to control the speed of the wheel. Read more

Proportional-integral-derivative, or PID, controllers are commonly used in industry to control processes such as temperature regulation, motor speed and flow rate. Here we will see how they can be incorporated into the RS-EDP Rover design to provide repeatable and reliable movement.

In order to drive the rover in a straight line, both its left and right motors need to rotate at the same speed. If one side was to rotate faster than the other, the rover would soon veer off from its current heading. Read more

The initial rover chassis was an old radio controlled buggy which belonged to someone in the office - it had some impressive wheels, an MDF structure which allowed an RS-EDP to sit neatly on top of it and two pairs of decent motors which could be driven from the RS-EDP-MC1 motor control modules. Read more