Adaptive Closed-loop Speed Control of BLDC Motors with Applications to Multi-rotor Aerial Vehicles

Antonio Franchi (1) , Anthony Mallet (2)

1 LAAS-RIS - Équipe Robotique et InteractionS
2 LAAS-IDEA - Service Informatique : Développement, Exploitation et Assistance

This paper introduces the adaptive bias and adaptive gain (ABAG) algorithm for closed-loop electronic speed control (ESC) of the brushless direct current (BLDC) motors typically used to spin the propellers in multi-rotor aerial robots. The ABAG algorithm is adaptive and robust in the sense that it does not require the knowledge of any mechanical/electrical parameter of the motor/propeller group and that neither a pre-calibration nor the knowledge of the feedforward/nominal input is needed. The ABAG algorithm is amenable to an extremely low complexity implementation. We experimentally prove that it can run in 27.5 µs on a 8 MHz microcontroller with no floating point unit and limited arithmetic capabilities allowing only 8-bit additions, subtractions and multiplications. Besides the controller implementation we present a self-contained open source software architecture that handles the entire speed control process, including clock synchronization, and over-current and blockage safeties. The excellent performance and robustness of ABAG are shown by experimental tests and aerial physical interaction experiments.

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]

Antonio Franchi, Anthony Mallet. Adaptive Closed-loop Speed Control of BLDC Motors with Applications to Multi-rotor Aerial Vehicles. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 2017, Singapour, Singapore. ⟨hal-01476812⟩