Application of LabView and cRIO for high precision positioning of mars rover using DC motors

Number of different techniques and algorithms has been developed to control speed and direction of the DC motor drives of unmanned vehicles for mars exploration. This paper mainly analyses and implements the techniques using LabView and compact RIO that can be interfaced together to control the speed of four DC motors to make the six wheeled mars rover with rocker-Bogie configuration able to move remotely on the mars surface. The rover chassis does not provide any mechanical steering (horizontal rotation) mechanism in either front or back side wheels to control direction of vehicle. Therefore the direction is controlled by controlling the speed of wheels independently. This work mainly focuses the interface of remote control and dc motors with a Reconfigurable Input/Output Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The complete control system is designed using LabView in real time. The speed of the mars rover can be affected by environmental changes therefore a PID controller is implemented to maintain the speed of the vehicle as desired. The feedback to the controller is provided by the incremental rotary encoder.