Flexible servo control of a fully electric-driven wheeled mobile robot for highway maintenance automation

For highly flexible and transparent actuator control, a fully-software-definable controller for various types of servo motors was proposed and developed by Yamazaki et al., (1988). The flexible architecture of that controller was designed such that the control of the three types of motors, DC, brushless DC, and induction motors, can be freely configured and implemented on any hardware by a mere software modification. In order to achieve higher performance and reliability and also to make the system compact, the ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) technology was fully utilized and one chip servo controller control logic was developed. The developed servo “flexible servo motor control” (FSC). Because of its flexibility and adaptability for distributed actuator control, in this paper, the FSC is applied to the control of an electric powered wheeled mobile robot for highway maintenance operations, The prototype system has shown excellent performance for the intended application