Traction Control Algorithm

[KenWittlief]

Its an interesting idea - if the motor was near stall condition, and it started to spin, the wheel rpms would increase suddenly and the current draw would drop

but I dont think it will drop a lot - its still going to take a lot of power to spin a wheel with that much weight on it

so I think what you are looking for is a change in current, a sudden change. That would prevent normal operation, like ramping up to speed quickly from tiggering your traction contol circuit

only thing Im wondering is how usefull this will really be - the kinetic friction of the wheel and the static friction - if they are not that much different, then stopping the motor for an 'instant' to hook-up with the surface again, will it really give you that more pushing power?

in fact, I think you might have the idea backwards - I would think you'd want to use the current sensors to detect when your motors are stalled, drawing 40 amps, and back them off! Seems to me that being able to spin your wheels in a shoving match is what you want - you can keep applying a strong force, but your motors are not spinning at 3 rpm and turning your robot into a moble easy-bake oven :c)

The idea for the RC filter makes sense, except a filter with that low of a cuttoff frequency would have a significant phase delay, so you would be doing the same thing the SW you referred to is doing, it would take a while for the sudden jump (rising edge) to get through the filter - the digital muli-sampling probabally works better - it can tell if a sudden high reading is a noise spike, or if its real (if it persists for several cycles).