Are we still using only 256 unique PWM steps?

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

I haven't taken apart a Victor, but it looks like there are just a bunch of LM317s in there. It looks like there's a large capacitor.

The devices you think are 317's are in fact IRL3103 Power MOSFETs in the Victor. As Eric pointed out the large cap on both the Victor and the Jag are to smooth power supply. 317s can't handle brake mode, make a minimum of 1.25 volts output when the control input is grounded, can't control 40 amps each and require a large diode for reverse polarity protection.
As to the resolution, most teams don't use the ~120 bits (accounting for the deadband and only one direction) as it is and most don't even calibrate the controllers.

[Greg McKaskle]

A few small points on the PWM signals.

The WPILib API uses a single float value ranging from -1 to 1. Under the hood, it maps this between the usable high and low int values based on the calibration info. This doesn't attempt to linearize the response, but does remove the outer shoulders. Even when not calibrated, these values are given mfr specific settings which should lead to pretty good performance, especially for drive motors.

As noted, neither the 9076's Freescale processor or the FPGA are 16 bit. The FPGA, as used, has no cores. It is highly reconfigurable, but for FIRST, thus far it acts as the high-horsepower I/O engine. It is capable of I/O rates up to 40MHz, but the I/O modules, especially those selected for use in the FIRST competition, take many cycles to reconfigure. The digital module being used is highly flexible with 32 channels, but with an access time of around 6.5microsecs. For discrete I/O on the robot, this is often the limiting factor -- encoder rate, PLM generation resolution, digital triggers, etc. As shown at ni.com/motion, the 9076 is not the limiting factor.

Greg McKaskle

[Michael Hill]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

The devices you think are 317's are in fact IRL3103 Power MOSFETs in the Victor. As Eric pointed out the large cap on both the Victor and the Jag are to smooth power supply. 317s can't handle brake mode, make a minimum of 1.25 volts output when the control input is grounded, can't control 40 amps each and require a large diode for reverse polarity protection.
As to the resolution, most teams don't use the ~120 bits (accounting for the deadband and only one direction) as it is and most don't even calibrate the controllers.

Ah, that makes a lot more sense. I was wondering how they would get by the 1.25 reference voltage of a LM317. I guess they COULD use LT3080s to get around that, but like I mentioned before, I haven't taken a Victor apart (mostly because they're not mine, and our team doesn't have the kind of resources to waste on me accidentally breaking a Victor).

The reason I mentioned that it would be nicer to have more resolution is well...put it this way. This year, the majority of teams (including 3138), had shooter wheels with a speed controller. If your max speed (that is full voltage to the motors/128 counts) is 4000 RPM, which is easily attainable, the finest you can change your motor speed by is ~30 RPM, which can be a heck of a difference. I'm sure there's got to be a way to use it as an unsigned value (that is 0-12V rather than -12-12V) to get 256 counts of resolution, but that would still only give you a 15 RPM resolution. While many teams figured out it didn't make a huge difference, it would be nice from a controls perspective to be able to control it down to a single RPM (which would be attainable with a 12-bit PWM signal)

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

The reason I mentioned that it would be nicer to have more resolution is well...put it this way. This year, the majority of teams (including 3138), had shooter wheels with a speed controller. If your max speed (that is full voltage to the motors/128 counts) is 4000 RPM, which is easily attainable, the finest you can change your motor speed by is ~30 RPM, which can be a heck of a difference.

If:

a) your wheel has sufficient moment of inertia, and

b) you are reading the wheel speed sensor, computing your control algorithm, and outputting a new motor command fast enough,

... then you are not limited by the resolution of the motor command.

In fact, you can get very accurate and stable motor speed with only 1-bit resolution of the command (ie ON or OFF), as described here.

[EricVanWyk]

Even an LT3080 would go vapor phase / light on fire / explode if used for this. Simply put, linear regulators are not used to drive motors. You should look up "H-Bridge" for some good explanations of how motor controllers work.

I'm still not convinced that you would actually see any benefit from additional resolution. The issue is resolution vs accuracy. In your 30RPM vs 4000 RPM example you have less than 1% error from resolution, but the accuracy is going to be many times that error from sources. For example, a good battery's rest voltage will vary several volts over the course of a match, and the actual voltage seen will swing wildly during normal transient loads. Open loop, any extra resolution in the bridge's duty cycle will be worthless.

To compensate, wrap a PID loop around an encoder on the wheel. This will help with the accuracy error sources, and will eventually oscillate around a few values as it tries to dial in the speed. It will never be perfect, but it should be good enough.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

What we had resorted to this year was to bump the speed on our flywheel-like shooter wheel to keep it in the range we needed for a specific shooting solution. The software people can discuss this in greater detail. When needed we added a little power to the wheel motors to keep it in the range. We used a simple encoder for wheel speed feedback. The first time I heard it running, I thought it was broken.

[Chris Hibner]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

The reason I mentioned that it would be nicer to have more resolution is well...put it this way. This year, the majority of teams (including 3138), had shooter wheels with a speed controller. If your max speed (that is full voltage to the motors/128 counts) is 4000 RPM, which is easily attainable, the finest you can change your motor speed by is ~30 RPM, which can be a heck of a difference. I'm sure there's got to be a way to use it as an unsigned value (that is 0-12V rather than -12-12V) to get 256 counts of resolution, but that would still only give you a 15 RPM resolution. While many teams figured out it didn't make a huge difference, it would be nice from a controls perspective to be able to control it down to a single RPM (which would be attainable with a 12-bit PWM signal)

You have the power to do this, with some custom software.

What you need is an output converter function (or sub-vi) that takes your desired 12-bit value and modulates the 8-bit PWM value. The modulation of the 8-bit PWM signal will increase your resolution. Here's an example of how to do it (get 12 bits from an 8-bit PWM):

1) Multiply the PWM output command (0.0 - 1.0 for your shooter motor that you should only command in one direction) by 127. You should end up with a PWM command with a whole part and a decimal part.

2) Take the decimal part and multiply by 16 and round to the nearest whole number. Call this number FractionalDuty. (Why 16? Because 12 bits has 16 time more resolution than 8 bits.)

3) Take the whole part of the number from step 1 and call it WholePWM.

3) In your fast loop, implement the following code:

if (counter < FractionalDuty)
   PWMOut = WholePWM + 1;
else
   PWMOut = WholePWM;

counter++;
if (counter >= 16)
   counter = 0;

Finally, convert back to 0.0 to 1.0 by dividing by 127.

What this does is it adds a one-count duty cycle on top of the PWM signal. It does it by increasing the 8-bit PWM by one count for a portion of every 16 timer loops. For example, if your FractionalDuty is 4, then it will increase the PWM output by one count for 4 out of the 16 loops. This averages your PWM output to be an additional 1/4 count. This will increase the resolution of your output, providing that your system time constant is much larger than the frequency of your added one-count duty cycle.

If you implement the above code in a 10 ms loop, you are modulating the PWM signal over a period of 160 ms. Most shooters this year spun up in about 2 seconds, giving them a time constant of about 500 ms. That makes the ratio of time constant to control cycle about 3/1, which isn't great, but it's not too bad. You might see your shooter speed oscillate by 5 RPM or so.

Note that the above code is to get the 12-bits that you want. If you go to 11-bits, you only need eight 10 ms loops to modulate your PWM. That gives your control cycle to time constant ratio of about 6:1, which is getting pretty good.


Disclaimer: I'm typing this while I'm being distracted by something, so my math might be off a bit.

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

Ah, that makes a lot more sense. I was wondering how they would get by the 1.25 reference voltage of a LM317. I guess they COULD use LT3080s to get around that, but like I mentioned before, I haven't taken a Victor apart (mostly because they're not mine, and our team doesn't have the kind of resources to waste on me accidentally breaking a Victor).

The reason I mentioned that it would be nicer to have more resolution is well...put it this way. This year, the majority of teams (including 3138), had shooter wheels with a speed controller. If your max speed (that is full voltage to the motors/128 counts) is 4000 RPM, which is easily attainable, the finest you can change your motor speed by is ~30 RPM, which can be a heck of a difference. I'm sure there's got to be a way to use it as an unsigned value (that is 0-12V rather than -12-12V) to get 256 counts of resolution, but that would still only give you a 15 RPM resolution. While many teams figured out it didn't make a huge difference, it would be nice from a controls perspective to be able to control it down to a single RPM (which would be attainable with a 12-bit PWM signal)

Chris tackled how to get in-between PWM values by playing with the output signal.

To go a step further, you are stuck thinking in purely electrical terms here. You need to start thinking about the system you are controlling mechanically, which is what ether was getting at by pointing out control with bang-bang. More specifically you need to think about the inertia of the system.

You can send minute increases and decreases to the motors powering the wheels MUCH faster than the intertia of the wheel system will allow it to react. That means through the use of PID, or Bang-Bang, you can achieve much better resolution that your electrical system analysis would suggest, because the intertia of your mechanical system serves to damp or average the response.

In conversations with other teams that I trust, I heard of some managing to control as tightly as +/- 5 RPM. Our final value was about +/-13 rpm by the time I got sick of playing with encoders and Jaguars and gave up.

Being able to control it to a 'single' rpm in the way that you suggest wouldn't work very well. It would take a very long time for the inertia of the system to respond to a tiny increase in voltage so that you could actually get to that rpm.