DNRacing v0.3 — Throttle, Steering & Brakes

Pulse Width Modulation Control over RC vehicle using an Arduino Uno.

After I completed building the SLAM navigation stack, I went on to work on steering/throttle control of my vehicle. Below is the video of the vehicle running simple commands.

I initially opted to use the open source VESC over the standard RC ESC because the standard RC ESC did not have robust throttle control at low speeds. Even the VESC was problematic at first because it needed a disarming sequence for the pulse width modulation(pwm) signals. A for-loop going through a wide range of pwm signals was used to find the disarming sequence. The pwm signals were sent from the Matlab Simulink control model into ROS, into the Arduino Uno, and finally into the VESC. In the end however, I used programmable RC ESCs (Tekin RX8 v2.0) because both of the VESCs fried. (Apparently the VESCs have a really fry-able DRM chip from Texas Instruments.) Instead of a electrical solution, I went for a mechanical solution by using a lower pinion gear (11T). To explain things in simpler terms, I created a small pipeline illustration below.

(A colorful visual I used for my MSc dissertation.)