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Welcome to WURC Rover Electrical Documentation HQ!!

This Wiki is a hub for the electrical system, including prototypes and final design documentation of instructions of use, design, and methods of operation. More summary sections will be added as more is written!

Control Schema Prototype

The initial plan for the control system was to have the brains and control system for the rover be run on a Nvidia Jetson Nano Developer kit which would do all the heavy lifting while the Arduino Giga R1 communicated with the control side, telling motors at what speed to rotate, taking sensor inputs and calculating the actual value, and controlling servos. The Arduino was essentially just acting as a PWM (pulse width modulation) controlling and an A/D (Analog to Digital) converter. We initially had troubles with the Jetson, so for the basic testing we used a Raspberry Pi 4B 8Gb as a substitute. There were troubles communicating from the RasPi to the Arduino with us needing to physically plug and unplug the Arduino from the RasPi each time the system was turned on and off.

Control Schema Plan

The current plan for the rover controller is to remove the Arduino and keep the Jetson Nano as the primary controller, utilizing I2C communication to have PWM drivers for all the motors and servos and using A/D for all analog inputs for sensors. We plan to have a Parent board to house all power distribution and the wiring for the control side of things with daughter boards attached with each daughter board controlling each component: Chassis (motors for movement), Arm (motors and servo control, and Science module (all servos, motors, and sensors). This will allow the most flexibility for future changes.