Power Electronics for Robotics

Modern robots make extensive use of many sensors and actuators and rely for their power on high-performance batteries that need proper care for safety and longevity reasons. Often, especially for space systems and swarm robots sent to harsh environments, the robots will be equipped with solar panels. The quality of operation of these robots strongly depends on the quality of the sensor readout systems and the power efficiency of the electronics that drive the actuators and convert the solar energy to energy stored in the batteries. For an optimal design of these robots, every member of the multi-disciplinary design team must be part of design discussions, bringing in their expertise domain and understanding the essence of the design problems and opportunities in the other disciplines. This course intends to enable the students to function like this for Analog Circuit Design and Power Systems Design by introducing a systematic design methodology for Analog Electronic Circuits and Power Electronics. The principles of power conversion are taught considering solar-panel/battery charging systems and motor drivers. The systematic analog circuit design principles are applied to negative feedback amplifiers for sensor applications. Still, they apply to other electronics circuits, like oscillators, filters, and other feedback systems like power converters.

The course intends to provide insight to the students into how these systems can be optimally designed by using the proper models at the right time, applying for the correct order in the design, and what design rules exist and how they are applied. It introduces a method to systematically separate a complex design problem into less complicated orthogonal sub-problems that are easier to solve, resulting in the optimal global solution.

This insight will enable the students to understand circuit and system designs created by expert designers and critically evaluate the performance and correctness of complex structures. It will allow the students to specify circuit and system designs correctly and contribute effectively to interdisciplinary discussions on design decisions with other experts.

The course treats:

For analog electronics, the lectures focus on a systematic way to design a negative feedback amplifier with an operational amplifier used as controller. Attention is paid to noise, bandwidth and drive capability requirements for the operational amplifier and the feedback network. A synthesis model for negative feedback amplifiers will be discussed that includes the influence of the source and load impedance. A bandwidth analysis method will be discussed that can be used to find the performance requirements for the operational amplifier and how to implement frequency compensation using the Phantom Zero method to obtain the required frequency characteristics.

For power systems, the principle of operation, analytical modelling and design of basic dc-dc power converters are presented. Also, the particularities of the solar-panels, such as the Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT), and battery charging principles and management systems and motor drivers. The influence in the selection of the control methods for the power electronics will be investigated. All this knowledge will be combined in order to derive a suited operational solution for the application at hand. The study will be verified using computational simulation tools.

During the lectures many practical demonstrations will be given.