Design and implementation of a servo system by Sensor Field Oriented Control of a BLDC motor

Abstract: A servo system intended to steer antennas on board ships is designed, built and tested. It uses a Brushless Direct Current (BLDC) motor with an encoder to keep track of its position, and Field Oriented Control (FOC) implemented on Toshibas microprocessor TMPM373 in order to control the current flowing to the motor. The servo system will be connected in cascade to another already existing servo system and controlled with two input signals. The first signal determines if the antenna axis should rotate clockwise or counter clockwise. The second signal is a stream of pulses, where each pulse means that the motor should move one encoder point. A printed circuit board is designed and built to complete these tasks. A proportional-integral regulator is used to control the position of the motor, using the position error as the controller input. The servo system is tested. The performance of the resulting servo system is sufficient to satisfy the required position error limit of 0.5 degrees. In order to reduce the periodic disturbances presented in the system in experiments, Iterative Learning Control (ILC) is implemented. It is shown that using ILC further decreases the position error.