<p>The Lunar Rover (Roony) is a robotic project group at Mälardalens University composed by students. The objective of this group is to design and build an autonomous robot that has to be able to move by itself through the moon terrain.</p><p>The Lunar Rover is divided in several sub-projects from different knowledge areas; the objective of this electronic thesis is to design a controller board.</p><p> </p><p>The designed board will be able to connect the robot to an external dispositive (via JTAG, or WIFI), and also it will control and connect the different robot’s peripherals.</p><p>The main component of the controller board is the microcontroller AT90CAN128.</p><p>The peripherals are a steeper motor, a LIDAR system (Light Detection And Ranging), a WIFI chip(WIPORT™), a bus can driver, an accelerometer, a LIPO( Lithium-Ion Polymer) battery charger, a Solar photovoltaic cell handler, and sixteen DC motors(four in each leg of the robot).</p><p>Once the logic design has finished, the PCB design is done attending the size limitations of the robot. Once the design has finished, a prototype has been built and tested using ATMEL software.</p>

The Lunar Rover (Roony) is a robotic project group at Mälardalens University composed by students. The objective of this group is to design and build an autonomous robot that has to be able to move by itself through the moon terrain. The Lunar Rover is divided in several sub-projects from different knowledge areas; the objective of this electronic thesis is to design a controller board.   The designed board will be able to connect the robot to an external dispositive (via JTAG, or WIFI), and also it will control and connect the different robot’s peripherals. The main component of the controller board is the microcontroller AT90CAN128. The peripherals are a steeper motor, a LIDAR system (Light Detection And Ranging), a WIFI chip(WIPORT™), a bus can driver, an accelerometer, a LIPO( Lithium-Ion Polymer) battery charger, a Solar photovoltaic cell handler, and sixteen DC motors(four in each leg of the robot). Once the logic design has finished, the PCB design is done attending the size limitations of the robot. Once the design has finished, a prototype has been built and tested using ATMEL software.

This thesis presents the design, construction and experiments done on a microcontroller board called 'SMARTY BOARD' targeted at small mobile robot applications. The primary motivation for this work was the lack of commercially available and cheap controller boards that would have all their components including interfaces on a single board. Having a single board simplifies the construction of programmable robots that can be used as platforms for teaching and learning robotics. Reducing the cost of the board as much as possible was one of the main design objectives. The target user groups for this device are the secondary and tertiary students, and hobbyists. Previous studies have shown that equipment cost is one of the major obstacles for teaching robotics in Australia. The other design objectives were robustness, reliability and functionality of the board. Most of the early technological learners such as high school students lack experience and expert knowledge for interfacing a controller board with other components. To prevent the learners from making errors, connectors on our board have been made foolproof (the user cannot damage the components of the board by plugging cables in the wrong sockets). Commercially available designs lack these essential features. After reviewing the commercially available micro-controller boards with respect to their suitability as teaching tools, we concluded that none of the existing microcontroller boards met our requirements. We then designed a new controller board based on previous boards. The main advantage of this new controller board is that it is a single board whereas the other controller boards are multi-board. Moreover, it is more foolproof. The new controller board was demonstrated at high-school seminars. In these demonstrations the new controller board was used for controlling two robots that we built. These robots are available as kits. The response from the high school teachers was very positive. The board has been selected as the platform for a robotic competition.

<p> The Serial Output Controller is one of the component boards of a Marine Navigation System. Litton Systems (Canada) Limited required the development of a test package for this board to be implemented on the DIGIPACT test station. This report introduc.es the subject of electronic component board testing with an overview of the test equipment and underlying philosophies used by Litton Systems for fault detection and fault diagnosis. The four stages of the test package development process, test plan definition, programming, validation and evaluation are described. The architecture of the DIGIPACT test system is presented as background information. </p> / Thesis / Master of Engineering (MEngr)

The space-based solar power system is an alternative to the ground-based solar power system because of its round-the-clock availability. For the space-based solar power transmission, the accurate pointing of a laser from space to ground poses a challenging control task. A gimbaled laser target system, which is used for pointing laser to a target, is a test bench for such a transmission system. The objective of this research is to determine the optimal controller for the gimbaled laser target system in terms of pointing error and error variation. In order to achieve the objective, we modeled the gimbaled laser target system, simulated the model with the controllers, and tested them on the test bench. In this thesis, we developed a mathematical model of a two-axis gimbaled laser target system. The model consists of a pitch-yaw gimbal for the dynamic laser motion, brushless dc motors for actuating the gimbal, and an image-based position sensor. We used a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller as the basis for the performance comparison since it is the most commonly used control method in the industry. Then we compared the PID controller with two statistical control methods - Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG), and Minimal Cost Variance (MCV) optimal controllers. We evaluated the pointing performance of the controllers by measuring the mean and the standard deviation of the pointing error. The simulation results indicated that the statistical controllers perform better than the PID controller under Gaussian disturbances. Between the statistical controllers, the LQG method had the smaller pointing error, while the MCV method had the smaller standard deviation of the pointing error. We then implemented the PID, LQG, and MCV controllers in an off-the-shelf dSPACE digital signal processing controller board, and tested the controllers on the test bench in a real time environment. The experimental results showed that the LQG method decreased the mean pointing error by 46.28% compared to the PID method. The LQG method reduced the standard deviation of pointing error by 47.85% compared to the PID method. The MCV method reduced the standard deviation of the pointing error by 53.09% compared to the LQG method. Both the simulation and experimental results showed that the MCV controller improved the pointing error variation performance over the LQG controller significantly, while slightly degrading the pointing error performance of the gimbaled laser target system. Experimental results indicate that the statistical controllers will provide a design parameter either to improve the mean pointing error or the standard deviation of the pointing error for the gimbaled laser target system. Subsequently, we believe that the statistical controllers will improve the space-based solar power transmission efficiency. / Electrical and Computer Engineering