New R/C Chicken or the Egg

[Gdeaver]

I don't think I made my point very well. The problem with the current RC is that it controls everything. Say your 2010 robot needs to have 6 victors and 6 motors. On 4 motors you want to have velocity and acceleration control all independent of each other. The motors - trans are coupled to encoders. The other 2 motors - trans need to control positioning and are coupled to potentiometers. The robot controller as it is now has a problem. There are not enough counters to handle the encoders. Even if you add external circuits to cut down on the number of counters the interrupt processing time increases. Each PID control loop takes time. Add to that the ADC time and other processing time, the controller is loaded up and the program is complex. The victors already have a pic in them. Now it times the hobby style PWM signal from the controller and turns the H bridge Fets on and off to control the current. In a serialized system, we would send a command to the speed controller over a communication buss. The victor PIC chip would then control the H bridge to effect that command. The encoder is connected to the victor PIC and the PID runs on the victor PIC. This can now be a 2 way system. We can ask the victor what the current draw is, whats the velocity, how many encoder ticks has it measured, is there a fault condition, etc. Basically we have added a co processor. This is a link to an implementation of this.
http://www.pololu.com/products/pololu/0425/
If we go to this type off controller then the new RC will have to have many serial busses. I2c, SPI, and RS485 or can or something.
This link might also be helpful to see what I'm talking about.
http://www.roboticsconnection.com/pc...ontroller.aspx
The development of this type of controll can be very complex and time consuming. The pay off is the ability to encapsulate the complexity and communications. Programming actions can be very simple. I program these type of systems all the time. I do not write or compile any code. I just whip out my trusty index finger and go down a menu specifying actions and parameters.