Advanced Servo Motor Control
Project Overview
Detailed control of servo motors for position.
We make use of some of the Advanced Teknic ClearPath servo motors control libraries. Motors are controlled so that they smoothly track a changing angular position. Target updates prior to completing movement, with smoothed velocity and acceleration profiles to correct.
Implementation
Advanced Teknic ClearPath servo have encoders allowing movements to be tracked. Included C++ libraries allow for interaction with hardware level variables, encoder data, as well as to change velocity and torque limits programmatically.
It is possible to set these servo motors into a position learning mode, whereby a time series of encoder positions is recorded and replayed later.
These motors Implementation in C++ allows for threaded control of multiple motors. Also, rather than rapidly approaching preprogrammed set points, we access the advanced software control functions of the motor to smoothly and continuously move to approach a constantly moving target position determined by a separate external process (or recorded earlier from the encoder).
The idea is to essentially allow the motors to smoothly reconfigure a new target prior to reaching the last one, so that the movement tracks a constantly shifting goal point. Being able to control multiple motors in this way is a precursor step for the 6DOF robot project.
