[Kevin Selavko]

Can you please give me your comments in this. It is one of the documents we would give to potential sponsors when we speak to them about providing money for a CAN system:


With encoders, the robot is able to determine the exact speed of its motors, the motor’s direction, and the exact position of the motor. The robot senses movement by monitoring changes in the pattern of the signals generated by the encoder. Each encoder generates two sine waves while it is active. Speed is calculated by the frequency of the signal, and direction can be determined by the offset of the two signal patterns. Exact position data is calculated by counting the number of pulses and the direction of the motor.

This is very useful, but it puts an extra strain on our main processor, the C-rio. The C-rio is a very advanced piece of hardware, it currently handles all of our visual tracking, sensor input, human input, running the main code, and giving out data to all of our digital and analog devices. This overworking of the main processor can lead to slow response times, unsafe operation, and failure of the whole system.

We would like to incorporate a CAN(Controller Area Network) system into our robot. CAN is commonly used in cars for many uses including: locking doors, transmissions, cruise control, and airbags. On our robot it would allow for two way communication between the C-rio and its motor controllers, in place of the one way communication we have now. With two way communication, our motor controllers would be able to process their own encoder data and act upon instructions given by the C-rio. This would allow for more accurate motor speeds with a faster response time of the robot. While the motor controllers would become more self sufficient, they will also send processed encoder data, such as the speed and position of the motor to the C-rio.